The Voynich Ninja

In another thread, Marco referred to McCrone's report about the blue ink:



I selected some blue surfaces from the large plants (first 20 or so folios). Each clip is from a different folio. As you see, there are a few ways in which the blue paint looks off. Sometimes there are dark spots, and often something yellowish shines through:

[attachment=2627]


What are your thoughts about this? Has anyone researched paint preparation before?
Is the blue-yellow a result of a suboptimal blend of different substances? Or is the yellow merely a result of a lighter blue wash with pen ink? Or are these the cuprite traces mentioned in the report?

Or - and this is where we enter Voynich territory - does the blue mask a color that was previously applied? While compiling this, I notice the ugliest blue is often found near yellow surfaces.

Similar things are found throughout the MS. Here's an example from the "white Aries" page. The top nymph has a light blue barrel where the wash seems mixed with yellow. The bottom one gets a relatively even blue, in quality not worse than the red of her dress.

[attachment=2628]

At least one manuscript where blue has been used for overpainting:

[attachment=2629]

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The Pontifical of Renaud de Bar
France, Metz or Verdun
c. 1303-1316
MS 298

We're very spoiled with modern pigments. They are designed to chemically intermix.

Natural substances are not always so cooperative. In theory, yellow and blue should make green, but in practice, if the chemicals resist mixing, or mix in incomplete ways, the results are either muddy or the colors don't completely blend into different shades. In the VMS, the greens have blended more cooperatively than the blues.

Which suggests that rather than the unnatural abundance of blues in the plants they may have been aiming for some blueish green?

The flower that was sampled by McCrone, leading to the identification of azurite with cuprite, was from f26r.

This is the area of the page:
[attachment=2630]

and this is the close-up as seen through the microscope (slightly rotated):
[attachment=2631]

In the microscope shot, the tiny ground crystals stand out clearly.

Thanks, Rene, I hadn't seen that shot before. Going by this, it looks like the cuprite is the cause of the deep, dark "dirty" spots rather than the pale yellow ones?

Hello Koen, yes indeed, that should be the cuprite. There might be more of this in the 2009 documentary.

I have no idea what has caused the pale yellow. Possibly an attempt to make a colour mix as mentioned above, or else something that 'went off' over time.
The azurite crystals look very bright for their 600 years, but that is something that I would have expected.

I'm not certain how much the painter tried to actually mix yellow and blue (violas are often yellow and blue) as opposed to trying to shade them into each other, because the painter appears to be aware that they don't mix well (in the sense of creating a new color), aware that the chemicals tend to stay separate from one another.

The green pigments appear to blend better and the painter took advantage of this and created quite a range of greens in the VMS, by mixing a base green with other colors, but as can be seen by Koen's examples, mixing the base blue with the base amber does not really result in green in the same way as one would expect with modern pigments.

I can't remember what McCrone had to say about the green (maybe they were uncertain about it), but from looking through the manuscript, it appears to be a more cooperative pigment than the blue.

I'm not sure if this one has been mentioned before, from f37v. See both flowers, but especially the one on the right. Did the thick blue paint flake off to reveal a greenish underlayer?

[attachment=8019]

I guess this can still be explained in two ways, as the blue being an overpainting meant to completely replace the original color, or as an attempt to "layer" two different colors to get some kind of effect. But I find this particular example to be quite... revealing.

Could it be that the paint, or one of its components, stained the parchment where it was applied?