The Voynich Ninja

(08-04-2018, 10:23 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.MarcoP,
thank you for the interesting comparisons.
The more such examples are presented, the more we may see that some of the "peculiarities" of the Voynich may well turn out to actually be quite common, and hopefully even characteristics of certain local practices.

I agree that, while the VMS looked totally bizarre to me when I first saw it, many of the weirdness is now familiar through several other works. Possibly, antropomorphic roots are the clearest case: I had never seen any such drawing before "discovering" the VMS, but now I have seen them in tens of different manuscripts. Other examples are the crossbowman/Sagittarius and the lizard/Scorpio.

On the other hand, many features remain very rare, even if not unique. For instance, the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you discussed, or the specifics of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. analysed by Koen (both found in Greek manuscript). An older case (discussed by Panofsky and Salomon) are the Spanish parallels for the radial arrangement of the "nymphs" in the zodiac pages.

I have not seen many examples of colour annotations, in particular in herbals. But they are a well documented and amply studied practice, so they probably could be considered as not-so-peculiar. But those in the VMS are special in at least two ways:
1. they were largely ignored by the painter (as in the Vermont herbal)
2. they (mostly, at least) appear to be in a different language than the main text (as in the Vicenza Bertoliana ms 362 herbal)

While 1 can be explained in the way you propose (the painter could not understand the annotations), 2 seems to me more perplexing. I would like to know more of the Vicenza ms. Was it written in Italy by a German? I hope this manuscript will one day be properly published and studied.

Quote:For me, one of the most intriguing questions regarding color annotations in the Voynich is this:
We can find color annotations in the "herbal" or "big plants" section of the Voynich, but in none of the others. Why is this?

It could be that the author lowered his quality standard as he progressed. The annotations could cluster at the beginning of the manuscript.

Quote:I remember from one of the papers cited in the thread you reference that one of the main purposes of color annotations was to indicate places where alternating colors were to be applied.
This is the type of use that we see in the leaves of your example of f1v.
But:
Outside of the big plant section, there are several sections with illustrations which feature alternating colors (for example: 67r1, or 69r, or the 9-rosette foldout, or the red/yellow stars in Q20, among others) yet these do not feature any color annotations.
Why the inconsistency?
Could this indicate that the choice of colors applied to those non-annotated illustrations didn't matter, and so the scribe left the painter free to add whatever colors he wanted?

I agree: a badly coloured flower makes the identification of a plant much harder. Other illustrations might have had a less "naturalistic" intent.

Quote:Or could this be a clue that the Voynich could be a copy of several distinct works: an herbal which contained color annotations, and other works which did not?

I think that in the Vermont and Vicenza herbal the annotations were not copied, but were added by the artist who drew the illustrations. Vermont's "brother", the Udine herbal, has no annotation: just properly painted plants - the simplest way to correctly reproduce colours is to paint the illustrations having the original in front of you. Likely, this was not possible for the Vermont ms: the scribe had access to the manuscript only for the time necessary to copy text and images, with no painting. He added the annotations, in order to allow for a later correct colouring of the plants (then something went wrong).
The Vicenza herbal was likely produced in Italy and almost certainly from an Italian original. I don't believe the German annotation can possibly have been copied.

In both cases, the presence of the annotations seems connected with the process of copying from an original. Of course, one could "annotate" plant colours even if drawing from actual plants or by memory, but I am not sure this practice is documented by actual evidence.

Quote:Or...???
(Sorry if I'm going off on a speculation tangent! The simultaneous presence and absence of color annotations in different parts of the Voynich is something that really intrigues me. )

Yes, this is all speculation, but the subject is fascinating indeed: text and images can hardly be more strictly connected. If we had more Voynichese colour annotations, we might even try to use them to identify the underlying language...

Just to add some more speculation, one could also consider another question: why did someone add the annotations in the first place? Is this proof of a planned team-work? Or was the author writing the annotations for himself and was then unable to properly finish his work (leaving the field to the horrible second painter)?

(09-04-2018, 10:07 AM)Hubert Dale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Can anyone say whether the plants which have the colour indicators are those for which it's easy to come up with identifications?  Might someone in the fifteenth century have come across the unilluminated VMS, scratched their head, and gone to another illustrated herbal and matched plants and colours as best they could?

Even though it's a reasonably good drawing, I don't think one can make a definitive ID for the plant on 1v.

There are a number of slightly viny plants (not vines, but plants that lean and stretch sideways or have slightly curving stalks) that have berries and clasping leaves that exhibit different colors that would qualify. It's really impossible to narrow it down to one and I can't understand why so many people latch onto one ID when there are almost always several plants with a certain cluster of characteristics.

The most likely possibilities (in my opinion) are Hypericum (there are three that are of particular interest) or one of the Old World Solanaceae (there are two that might qualify). It could even be Veronica beccabunga, Anagallis arvensis, Vaccinium oxycoccus, Azalea procumbens, or Cucubalus baccifer, all of which are viny with berry-like fruits, some of which have red and green leaf variations.


I'm leaning toward Hypericum for two reasons... the leaves of some species do somewhat alternate red and green (it's a distinctive characteristic of the plant) and some species are crushed to produce a red dye. The root looks like it MIGHT be mnemonic for a piece of fabric, so a plant that yields dye would fit. Nevertheless, I don't think the other possibilities can be ruled out.



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Oh, something I should mention... the dye color that comes out of the plant is not always the final color. Depending on which chemicals (from other plants, or vinegar, or other substances) that are mixed with the dye, the combination can produce quite a range of colors, some of which don't look like the original color. For example, onion skins of the same color can create a wide range of natural dyes ranging from brownish-blues to yellow, orange, and brown.

(09-04-2018, 11:13 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - what appears to  be an occurrence of "rot" in reddish paint...

It does indeed! And strengthens the interpretation of both annotations possibly being "rot".

The larger "rot" (the vertical one) has always looked like a different hand to me from most of the other marks that look like color annotations.

When I first saw it, I thought it might be a Latin-alphabet annotation by someone used to writing in a different alphabet (Hebrew is the most obvious one that comes to mind, based on the way the shapes are combined), but the more I looked at it, the more it looked to me like it was written by someone young, with an inexperienced hand, or someone old, with failing coordination. I had not yet seen the "r o t" in f7r.


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I would agree that the one in 32r looks like a "p" and what is probably a "v" underneath (which could be either "v" or "u" in medieval times).

Does You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. also have text in the flowers?

I removed some of the blue and the one on the right does look like a brown glyph. The one on the left is not so clear:



If that is a letter on the left, then it doesn't look like the same as the one on the right, but the flowers are colored the same dark blue.

I don't want to say what they look like until after people have had a look. I don't want to influence their perceptions, so I'll add add my thoughts in a spoiler tag.

Quote:f32r - an only partially reading annotation. Rene's description: "A 'p' and what looks like a 'v' or an 'r' in the bottom right flower. There could be another character after the 'p'." This is similar to the annotation in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (por?), but it cannot be the same, because the letter after the 'p' (if it does exist) cannot be an 'o'. The word could also resemble the annotation "prau[n]" in the Vicenza ms I mentioned above, but a flower seems more likely to be purple than brawn.

I remember we discussed that letter combination in the comments on Nick's blog some years ago. My suggestion was p.v. = purper-var

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Regarding f1v, with its "g" in the leaf for the supposed "annotation" of green and another letter in another leaf.

It's worth noting that we don't encounter other annotations of "green" elsewhere (do we?) That's actually what one may expect, because the leaves of plants are usually green (I think ). So that just does not require any special annotation.

In the case of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it was important to mark that some leaves are green and some are of some other colour. Would that serve as a clue for identification?

The important thing about 1v is that the leaves are two colors and I think this was done deliberately to help identify the plant. If it is Hypericum (one of a number of possibilities, but Hypericum is one of the top choices on my list), then it makes complete sense because one of the distinguishing characteristics of Hypericum is the red and green leaves. Also, as I mentioned upthread, a red dye-sap is extracted from the leaves.

I posted pictures of the plant on a long-ago thread and so did Linda:





So... that might account for the "g" and also the other mark in the reddish-brownish-yellow-colored leaf on the right.

One of the reasons I favor Hypericum over Atropa belladonna for plant 1v is because nightshade has petioles and the drawing has the leaves tight against the stem (which is true of several species of Hypericum but not so characteristic of Old-World nightshade).


For the record I don't think it looks like a clove plant. I do think it somewhat resembles the Alkanna plant (Henna), which has round fruits at the ends of the stalks, and the other plants I posted upthread. Vaccinium also has red and green leaves later in the year but the berries don't have the little whorled bracts. If the person who drew it was being sneaky, it could also be Anagallis arvensis (scarlet pimpernel) with the colored leaves standing in for the color of the flowers, but I don't think so. This plant seems pretty naturalistic.

(09-04-2018, 07:26 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Does You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. also have text in the flowers?

I removed some of the blue and the one on the right does look like a brown glyph. The one on the left is not so clear.

Hi JKP,

Yes, it does - well spotted.  Looks like [p]ur on the right to me, although I can't see the 'p' clearly.  Helmut will correct me, but I think he has previously suggested it was an abbreviation of 'purpurfaber'?

Ogburn's list is useful but not complete, and because better scans are now available some of his readings have been improved.  I keep failing to get round to finishing an updated listing I've been working on, but now I've found I'm not the only person who finds these hidden letters so interesting I'll get back to work!

I can see only one letter-candidate here, and it's either a tiny capital "T" or a part of a larger "F" or "f". It's tempting to consider it "P" (for "purper"), but looks more like "F".