The Voynich Ninja

(17-05-2026, 05:06 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..] If I see female figures with their feet and hands inside tubes, I have to ask myself what that means; I have to try to give an answer.

I can drop another prominent name for that matter: Walt Disney.

He or one of his top draftsmen once said that it is a very harsh business to draw complete hands and feet in his cartoons, enormously time-consuming.
So many (Disney) cartoon figures have just 3 fingers and are wearing shoes — easier to animate when you have to thousands of drawings.
VMS shows ~500 figures.
It is indeed much entertaining to follow the tricks the VMS artist made for reducing his workload and saving some time.
Beyond such very practical reasons, all other ideas are just assumptions without any proof…

I'm glad you're enjoying my ideas, Stefan. If I at least make you happy, I'll consider my participation in the forum a success.

I think the most useful thing for understanding the Voynich is to destroy the common idea that in Quire 13 we see women bathing or that it is a gynecological section or that it has to do with female organs.

  If there's one thing that's devilishly confusing, it's the green and blue colors used by the author in Quire 13. Most of the pools are painted green, and it's reasonable to assume the artist placed the female figures in water. The problem is that there are also figures in blue pools, like those in f84v. In the description of that page, ReneZ assumes on his website that it's also water, but that's highly unlikely.

  A few years ago, bi3mw observed that there were female figures in blue tubes that were not inside but on the surface, as if floating in the air. This occurs on pages f76v, f79r, f80r, and f82v. Therefore, in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. pools, the female figures also float in the air. The idea that the author wanted to represent air with the color blue is reinforced by the fact that practically on every page of Quire 13, blue is always on top.

   What explains all this? In my opinion, it represents the astral influence on plants through the metaphor of female figures descending from the sky. What they then encounter on their journey is water, in accordance with the arrangement of the spheres surrounding the Earth in the medieval cosmological conception.

(27-05-2026, 04:46 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If there's one thing that's devilishly confusing, it's the green and blue colors used by the author in Quire 13.

Why do you believe that the colors are original, defined by the Author?

The choice of colors and of what should be painted, and the rather careless way the paint was applied, tell me that the Painter was a later owner who did not even understand the drawings. 

All the best, --stolfi

You claim the painter didn't understand the drawings. You say this as if you did, which I doubt because you have a very poor opinion of the Voynich imagery.

  It seems logical that if the paint had been applied by a later owner, they would have done so with more care. But this is not the case, because the paint in all the images of the codex has not been applied correctly and carefully.

   Furthermore, in many of the female figures in pools, the lower legs and feet have not been drawn, suggesting that the author already intended to apply colors later to give the impression that those parts of the anatomy were hidden.

(28-05-2026, 10:15 AM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You claim the painter didn't understand the drawings. You say this as if you did, which I doubt because you have a very poor opinion of the Voynich imagery.

Well, yes, I do have a very low opinion of the Scribe's artistic abilities.  Not because I understand the drawings (which I mostly don't) but by seeing how he could not even divide a circle into four equal parts, or how his nymph drawings improved (or failed to) as he got more experience drawing them.

Quote:It seems logical that if the paint had been applied by a later owner, they would have done so with more care.

That is assuming that later owners would have had the same reverence for the book that we have now.  Or that Baresch had.  I still suspect that the Painter was a pre-adolescent child who was allowed to use it as coloring book. 

Whether that was the case or not, I think it is likely that some later owner (probably not the Jesuits or Wilfrid) decided to have the book painted to increase its sale value -- since it would be competing in the "market" against other fantastic herbals, like the Alchemists' Herbal, which were all painted.

Quote:Furthermore, in many of the female figures in pools, the lower legs and feet have not been drawn, suggesting that the author already intended to apply colors later to give the impression that those parts of the anatomy were hidden.

If a nymph was meant to be standing or sitting in the water, he would not have drawn her legs and feet anyway, irrespective of whether the water was meant to be painted or not.  So that detail is not evidence that the illustrations were meant to be painted.

In fact, there are many examples throughout the book where the paint obscured or erased important details of the drawing.  Including the lower legs or feet of some nymphs.

On the SW corner of f79r, for example, the nymph was apparently meant to be standing or sitting, not in a pool but under a waterfall, leaning against a back rest supported by two vertical poles.  The Painter painted over her leg and feet, one of the poles, and erased the lower part of the waterfall.   He may have erased also some other stuff inside the "pool", to the right of the nymph's legs.

On the facing page f78v, the Painter painted with green the portholes on the wall of the big tub.  But those can only have been openings into a space below the floor of the tub, where fire would be lit to heat the water (as in a japanese ofurō).  Thus their color should have been orange, red, or yellow, or black -- not green.

And then there is the "noise" created by the BEEP sorry...

All the best, --stolfi

(28-05-2026, 11:22 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..] I think it is likely that some later owner (probably not the Jesuits or Wilfrid) decided to have the book painted to increase its sale value [..]

Well, I don‘t think so. f 1r leaves space for the 2 big leading capitals (in some non-voynichese alphabet) which are intended there by the author and coloured red.
One of the rare occasions where the VMS follows the standards of medieval manuscripts, red-coloured capitals were a rather common way of starting chapters, sentences or books.
If one thing is clearly set for colouring, others can be that also.

There is no reason and, more important, no proof of the VMS becoming some kind of colouring book much much later.
I would asssume several scribbles, in words, sentences and „graphical“ content, being added a long time later, but not the colours.

(28-05-2026, 12:52 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.f1r leaves space for the 2 big leading capitals (in some non-voynichese alphabet) which are intended there by the author and coloured red.

Indeed those capitals were intended to be there, and surely determined by the Author.  However, they are outlined in the general brown ink of text and drawings.  So we can only say that the outlines are original -- not so for the paint.

Those big upside-down hanzi mysterious letters probably were meant to be painted in, and the Author probably did intended to paint the rest or the images too.  Maybe those two glyphs were painted while the book was still in the Author's hands.  But, even if that was the case, it still does not follow that the other colors in the rest of the book were applied on that occasion too.  Any or all of them may have been left unpainted until long after the book left the Author...

It would have been great if McCrone had tested that brick-red paint (hematite?), so that we could compare it to the brick-red paint elsewhere.  Alas they did not sample that one...

Quote:One of the rare occasions where the VMS follows the standards of medieval manuscripts, red-coloured capitals were a rather common way of starting chapters, sentences or books.

I have seen books, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., where space was left for the capitals but these were never drawn.  In other books, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the capitals were drawn in bright orange-red (minium?), but with no outlines -- almost surely right after the text was written, in the same "manuscript factory".

The first example, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., seems to have been hastily made by a hired scribe, for personal use by a student or scholar.  Thus the scribe limited himself to the text. The client presumably would have had to hire another "calligrapher" scribe to draw big capitals; but he evidently did not see it worth the cost.  I think that was the case for the VMS, too: the Scribe's task was the text and drawings in brown ink, and the Painter was someone else.  The question is only when this second step happened.

Quote:There is no reason and, more important, no proof of the VMS becoming some kind of colouring book much much later.

There is no proof, true.  But there are several reasons to suspect that the colors were applied when the book was no longer in the Author's hands.  Like the apparently "wrong" colors, colors obscuring drawings and writing (like the labels on some Pharma jars), and colors applied so crudely that they make the book uglier rather than prettier.

By the way, I think also that the main round of BEEP happened before the painting, by someone else.

All the best, --stolfi

(28-05-2026, 02:56 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The choice of colors and of what should be painted, and the rather careless way the paint was applied, tell me that the Painter was a later owner who did not even understand the drawings. 

Writing was obviously careless too (unreadable or very ambiguous) a few times per page on average.

[attachment=15802]

So by the same logic the text was written by scribes who didn't understand its meaning.

The colors we see in the Voynich images were applied by the authors themselves. To think otherwise is baseless speculation. 

  One unusual feature we see in plants is the large majority of blue flowers, something that doesn't align with what we observe in nature. This is due to a symbolic logic employed by the authors to connect the flowers with astronomical, cosmological, and zodiacal sections—in other words, with the blue sky.

   In Quire 13 I already said that the colors lend themselves to confusion, but in my opinion they obey the same symbolic logic and that is why we always see the color blue on top.

    As I already said, there are four pages in which the female figures are not within the blue color but above it, as if they were floating. Therefore, when we see the group of female figures inside blue pools, we cannot think that they are in water, as they appear to be in the green pools. They are simply floating in space.