The Voynich Ninja

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(10-01-2020, 10:02 AM)Aga Tentakulus 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.

Buried in 1513 with the first known example of a mitre crown. This can be seen as the successor to the type of crown we are looking for, which is one with open arches.


Looking at it again, I notice for the first time that it is only one arch, not two crossed ones like in the statue. It's more like this one:
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The article says that this crown was crafted specifically for the funeral, so it's not the same crown he wore.

But let me introduce some methodological considerations.

First of all, I agree that it's unreliable to use posthumous representations. The coins are things which allow one who has never seen the king to have the idea of what his crown looks like. However, coins may show simplified or "template" imagery.

Next, the crown. As far as I understand, a crown is a thing which is associated not with a particular person, but with the kingdom. The crown is passed to the successor from his predecessor, and it's not that each new monarch has a new crown, unless of course there is some special occasion to craft a new crown (like the previous one is lost, or the kingdom greatly expands and is in need of a new symbol).

It's a pity that the crown sheet posted by JKP lacks the description list specifying which is each particular crown.

I don't understand though how it is with the spouses. Suppose there is a reigning king and he wears the crown. He has a wife (the queen). Would the queen also wear a crown? If yes, would that be her "personal" crown used just for decorative purposes, or that crown is something which would be tranferred to a successor?

Then, the usage of crowns in the VMS.

Considering that those nymphs and circles represent the calendar, I can think of the following ideas of crown usage:

1) Marking the dates of some social importance associated with the Crown. I can think only of tax due dates.

2) Marking the dates relevant to the reigning kings and queens (dead monarchs would not be of importance in this context) as the consequence of public celebration of those days. I can think of birthdays, coronation days and saints' days of the monarchs.

3) Marking the the dates relevant to the kings and queens as a matter of idle personal recollection for the author's own amusement. In this context, death dates might be used as well. Here's the day when king N died, here's the day when queen Y died, and I have survived them all. The "es liegen drei Kaiser begraben in Prag" by Brecht bears some of this motif.

I will correct the thread name to reflect the broader topic.

Based on what I saw when I was collecting crown images, the queen is often shown with a similar but less less-fancy crown, but occasionally hers is the same as the one worn by the king.

This might be regional and temporal. Some places acknowledged the queen as important or as having some authority, others did not.

This is 19th century (Willem-Alexander), but it does have some helpful information about crowns. The later crowns in many countries were designed like the earlier (16th century) crowns of the emperors. There was definitely one-upmanship going on over the centuries. The early crowns were laurel wreaths.

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Wow, I just noticed there are a LOT more crown pictures online than there were five years ago and some of them are the actual crowns:

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A variety of crown styles. Unfortunately no dates and no info on how these were collected (did they copy museum specimens? or did they copy sculptures or manuscript images?? if so, they might be fancier than the actual crowns):

I read a while about Russian crowns, and unfortunately it's been greatly unsystematic. Certain unification dates back only to 1762 when the "Big imperial crown" (that shown in JKP's figure above) was crafted for the coronation of Catherine the Great. Prior to that, Tsarinas Catherine I, Anne and Elisabeth, as well as Tsar Peter II each had their own crown. Prior to that still, Russian rulers used hats, not crowns, and Peter the Great was the last one to use the coronation hat.

Along with main, or "big", crowns, lesser, or "small" crowns were used (as far as I understand, for female monarchs only) - those mostly for "everyday" occasions, such as ceremonies. In 1801 a small crown was made for Tsar Alexander I's wife who was not the reigning person. In 1884, a "wedding" crown was made which was used by brides at weddings of members of the reigning family, albeit those were princes or princesses only.

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1475 depiction

So from my point of view of zodiac ages instead of months, this puts the Libra page quite far back in time, about 14000 BC. Could the crown simply be a crown? That happens to match the contemporary regional examples just as the merlons happen to match regional architecture to some degree? Ie that is what the artist knew because it was nearby but is used in a farther reaching capacity, or possibly to denote said region?

It might be saying there were societies or civilisations already there that long ago. For instance, the Pannonian Basin became the Kingdom of Hungary.

There was probably a migration of populations from the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to Europe during the Mesolithic, around 14,000 years ago, much earlier than the migrations associated with the Neolithic Revolution.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font] A few specimens from the Villabruna Cluster also show genetic affinities for East Asians that are derived from gene flow.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font] The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. pigmentation characteristic of modern Europeans is estimated to have spread across Europe in a "selective sweep" during the Mesolithic (19,000 to 11,000 years ago). The associated You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. alleles, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., emerge around 19,000 years ago – during the LGM and most likely in the Caucasus.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font] The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. variation for blue eyes first appears around 13,000 to 14,000 years ago in Italy and the Caucasus.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font]

It may suggest far reaching power of one individual. Perhaps artefacts exist to support this.

[i]Albert, by the grace of God elected King of the Romans, always August, King of Hungary, Dalmatia, Croatia, Rama, Serbia, Galicia, Lodomeria, Cumania and Bulgaria, elected King of Bohemia, duke of Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, margrave of Moravia, Lord of the Wendish March and Port Naon, Count of Habsburg, Tyrol, Ferrete and Kyburg, etc. Margrave of Burgau and landgrave of Alsace.[/i]

It may suggest lineage, genealogy. Wiki says Albert was related to all the German kings.

R Sale - I noticed that too about Philip the good and his son.

Aga Tentaculus  - i come across Anglification of names all the time in genealogy, names changed to English versions, just like Charles above was alternatively Karl, Karel, or Carolus. I think it is because otherwise the pronunciation would likely be awkward and wrong if speaking of the person by name in another language. The software i use allows you to enter the names in different languages for this reason.

JKP - i like the Aphrodite example for those headresses. Fits in nicely with where i think they are portrayed to be.
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By the way, this pic of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. reminds me of the crown in Leo as well as Libra. Pic is evidently dated 1488.

@Antone
Of course, it's not the real crown. The real one is in the vault for imperial relics in Vienna.
Frederick III commissioned his own tomb 30 years before his death.

"Decade Project
Frederick himself had already commissioned his tomb in 1463, thirty years before his death. Nevertheless, it took another twenty years before it was completed: in the meantime, the deceased emperor had to wait in the Ducal Crypt of the Cathedral before he could finally move into his final resting place in 1513. Frederick's son Maximilian I had pushed the project forward and documented this in detail.

This is also how the crowns of the predecessors and successors should be viewed. For example, Maximilian I had a different crown than his father. So also the archduke ( brother ) had his own crown, although not an imperial one.
To understand everything correctly, one should take a look at the history of the Habsburgs from 1250 - 1450.

With the empresses, they were depicted with imperial crowns as well as with their own.

The crown of Frederick is common. From Bern Zurich to Vienna, and Hungary and from Prague to Italy

From You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

Albert:



Ladislaus V:



These two were of the house of Habsburg.

Sigismund, also of Habsburg, who preceded Albert, is depicted with three crowns (looks like the "main" crown is at the bottom:



probably because he was a king of Hungary, Germany and Bohemia all at once, although he was not the only one in the list to reign more than one kingdom, so that's a bit strange.

Vladislaus I, who reigned between Albert and Ladislaus V, and who was of another house of Jagiellon, is, nonetheless, depicted with the same crown:



So is Mathias I, who was yet of another house - that of Hunyadi:



Sigismund's wife Mary is depicted with the same crown, as is best seen in the full-scale image:



Back into the past, Sigismund's predecessor Charles II wears the same familiar crown:



So does Louis I:



and Charles I:



(all them up to Mary were of the house of Anjou).

The early 14th century monarchs Otto and Wenceslaus, who were members of two other houses, are shown with the same crown, so I'm lazy to post them.

It looks like that, at least to Johannes de Thurocz, the author of the Hungarian Chronicle, the crown was not an attribute of the house, but rather of the kingdom. It makes sense to look at the description of Sigismund in the chronicle to find out what did the three crowns mean.

Here is the title page of the chronicle:



It features a similar crown, yet not exactly the same. Note also the stuff at 7 o'clock  - these two are different, and more like the "summer" crowns of the VMS.

Chronica Hungarorum postdates the VMS by several decades, but may reveal the general model.

In the above images, minor differences between the crowns can be seen, I'm not sure if that's intentional.