The Voynich Ninja

On pages 88v and 99r it has large areas of red. Here it can possibly judge better.

This also means that the conspicuous absence of "red" in certain sections and subsections is either intentional, or it implies that they didn't even have enough of the most basic pigments.

Or maybe with the few arma christi similarities in mind, they might've needed red only to show blood/a small set if things, so didn't need much of it anyway..

Gold cost more. True red cost more. Certain forms of blue also cost more. Ochre (shades of brown, brick, and yellow) were easier to obtain. I'm familiar with ochre but I don't know much about medieval green.

The green has been mixed with amber, brown and maybe sometimes blue. I don't know what the predominant pigment was for green in the Middle Ages, but it was probably more widely available than gold, red, and blue.

Gall ink (brown or blackish-brown) was readily available and I assume less costly than other pigments.


White was usually white lead, but I don't know how costly it was. There is very little white in the VMS (almost none) and the shades that usually are mixed with white are absent also.

It might be helpful to know which green pigments were predominant and what they cost compared to the others.

Many early-medieval manuscripts had only orange and green (for initials and for drawings).

Many later medieval manuscripts had only red and blue (popular for titles and capitulum symbols).


I don't know how many of the "orange" colors in early-medieval manuscripts are faded reds and how many of them were intended to be orange.

(27-05-2020, 09:48 AM)Common_Man Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Or maybe with the few arma christi similarities in mind, they might've needed red only to show blood/a small set if things, so didn't need much of it anyway..

This is definitely my pet theory: that certain sections focus on the Passion and they reserved the brightest red for the blood of Christ (or maybe blood in general?). I haven't tested in detail yet how well this would work though.

So. Pigments. I have written a lot of notes about the VMS pigments and I was thinking of turning them into a blog post (I'd need to commit to an actual website and that's a whole other problem), but I can share some of them here.

Things I think people should know about medieval pigments.

• If the paints have been made correctly then it is very hard to identify their base-pigments with absolute certainty just by using your eyes. If something went wrong when they were making the pigment then that can make it easier to identify by eye because some of the pigment-problems are quite distinctive.
  
• Using modern techniques likes spectroscopy allows you to identify the mineral pigments with absolute certainty, but most of the plant-based pigments can't be identified using spectroscopic techniques (although the information that the colour you are interested in is made from organic rather than inorganic material is sometimes enough to identify it by process of elimination).
  

(27-05-2020, 10:18 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't know how many of the "orange" colors in early-medieval manuscripts are faded reds and how many of them were intended to be orange.

The oranges that you see in European early medieval manuscripts (let's say pre-1100) are almost entirely faded reds. The favourite red for pre-1100 Europe is red lead (PB3O4) which produces a slightly orange-toned red even when prepared perfectly, and when prepared badly it becomes increasingly neon orange. Over time, even the well-prepared red lead pigments fade to a slightly orange-y colour. Red lead was known as "minium" in Latin and it's where we get the term manuscript miniature from as a type of illustration popular in the late-Roman world was always done with minium and the term for the red illustrations came to be used for manuscript illustrations more generally. Post-1100, the favourite European red is vermillion (mercury sulphide) which is a more blue-toned red. 

I think it's interesting that the red colour in the VMS is an ochre. The ochre pigments were popular throughout the middle ages (pre- and post- 1100) as they produce a range of yellows, oranges, reds and browns, but the ochres are basically ... mud. Ochres are very cheap pigments - they lack brightness and clarity, but they're stable, easy to find compared to most pigments, and easy to prepare.

I can't tell what the green is in the VMS. The popular greens are derived from malachite, verdigris (the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is pretty good for this), and terre verte (clay coloured by iron oxide, magnesium, aluminium silicate, or potassium). There are other ways to make green, but those three were the most popular. If I had to guess at all I would suggest that it's probably not a verdigris-derived green in the VMS because the paint is quite thick in some places and verdigris tends to oxidize and/or eat through the parchment when it is painted on as thick as the green has been in the VMS, but all of the popular greens have a lot of variation and can all produce the slightly cloudy-grey-green of the VMS, so even verdigris is not impossible.


I have no idea about the yellow (candidates: orpiment; lead-tin-yellow; tin(IV) sulphide; a ferric-oxide ochre) except to say that whoever prepared the paint did not do a very good job.

I agree with all of you that the pigments used in the VMS are cheap. The pigments that have been scientifically identified are all among the cheapest options for producing that colour. The preparation of the pigments into paints is not of the best quality either as the colours in the VMS are sometimes streaky, inconsistent and a little bit dull and muddy. The application of the paint is not the best either. I think the VMS artist(s) was careful and drew things deliberately and with purpose, but, to me, the quality of the line work and the paint application seems much closer to amateur than professional.

arca-libraria, I guess that you have seen the McCrone report (summary) that is publicly available You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

It should clarify the question about the greens, or at least some of them.

For the yellow, which has faded, Abigail Quandt suggested in 2014 that this is quite possibly an organic pigment. She pointed to:

M.Clarke: Colours versus Colorants in Art History: Evaluating lost Manscript Yellows., Revista de Historia da Arte (2011), pp.139-151.

but I suspect you know this already...

Arca, do you think the variable  (sometimes okay, sometimes horrendous) paint job in the VM might be because of the cheap pigments? Like they bought their supplies at a "discount store" and were unable to achieve decent results? So far, the discourse (including my own) has focused almost entirely on the lack of consistent skill of the painter(s), but low quality art supplies might add a new dimension as well.

@ReneZ thank you - I hadn't actually seen the paper in full before, I went looking for it years ago and I think the only thing I found back then was a screenshot of the conclusions. I've only skimmed the paper quickly but my initial impressions are that there is nothing earth-shatteringly strange in the paper's findings. The trace elements are interesting, but because they're only traces, it is hard to draw any conclusions.

The stuff in the McCrone report about the green are the most interesting to me because I had forgotten that copper resinate rises in popularity in the 15th century. The copper resinate would have been a relatively "new" pigment when the VMS was being made, but it became popular very quickly because it improves the usability and stability of verdigris/copper acetate derived greens with not too much additional effort or cost. My subjective observation is that copper resinate generally appears brighter and richer than the way it does in the VMS, which again suggests either lower quality pigments or that the person responsible for transforming the pigments into paints was not an expert.

I avoided discussing the yellow because it's so pale and translucent that it could easily be an organic or just a heavily diluted mineral pigment. I haven't read the Clarke chapter before so I'll add it to my reading list - thank you.

@Koen it's a good question, but it's hard to answer. I think the main reason for the variable but sometimes poor paint job in the VMS is more to do with the person(s) doing the painting than anything else. I think that the art in the VMS is detailed and careful and deliberate, but it is very poorly executed with wobbly lines, poor expression of form, and inconsistent paint application. I've written out a few things below that I've been thinking about in relation to the paint in the VMS. I have included some questions alongside my thoughts, even though some of the questions are impossible to answer.

• If we exclude the writing ink, then in all cases where the pigment has been identified, the artist has used one of the cheaper pigment options for each of the colours in the VMS. A lot can go wrong when making pigments so it is possible that lower-quality batches of pigment were sold at cheaper prices, or that the lower quality batches were kept for use in less "important" or "popular" projects.
  
• Did the VMS team buy pre-made wet paints (i.e. the pigment mixed with some sort of binder), or did they buy the dry pigments and transform them into paint themselves? Did they buy the raw ingredients and make their own pigments? The answers partly depend on the individual pigments because some pigments have to be transformed into wet paints just before you use them, but others will remain stable and useful for a while after a binding medium has been added. The paints in the VMS are a bit dull and are quite grainy on some pages which suggests that the quality of the ingredients and/or the skill of the person making them were not the best. However, the paints aren't terrible and they have survived without flaking off, turning black, or disappearing entirely, which should count in their favour. If we assume that the VMS was intended for a very small audience (and this is just a hypothesis for this question - the VMS audience is another problem entirely) then having high quality illustrations in terms of both art and pigment may not have been important or useful.
  
• Does the paint application tell us anything about sources that may have inspired the VMS? This is basically impossible to answer, but you will have all seen the translucent-tint-and-wash style of illustration that was popular at various times in the middle ages (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The VMS artist(s) sometimes seems to want fully opaque paint application, but some illustrations in the manuscript are filled in with very blobby translucent washes of colour, so was the artist trying to emulate a particular style, or simply trying to make the paint last longer, or doing it for another reason entirely?