Thank you, Lisa.
Do you happen to know if more pictures of the spine were taken that maybe weren't released? I am dying to know the stitching pattern under the protective strips. Every time I look at the picture where the side of the cord is peeping out, I wish I could push it to the side with a fingernail and get a glimpse of the pattern underneath.
(08-11-2020, 09:39 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.These are narrow strips to support the binding. There are several of them throughout the MS.
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I believe, from memory, that they are also parchment.
If they were dated, we might know when this binding was done.
That sounds interesting, but really won't help us a lot, and these tests are expensive.
Has anyone contacted theses people? It sounds like it would be mutually beneficial, which might mitigate the expense?
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Dear Lisa,
looking forward to that.
I can provide a bit of background information, some of which you certainly know already.
When, in 2014, the MS was scrutinised by MS conservators from Yale, the Folger, Library of Congress and the Walters, I was initially surprised that they concentrated their attention primarily on the binding details, especially the opened spine, and much less on the writing and the fancy illustrations. At the time, the question of 'genuinely old' was a hot topic, in the wake of the Galileo fake. I realised all this afterwards. In any case, I was standing close by and had my ears wide open. They looked at it from all angles. The verdict on the binding was: genuinely old, probably 15th century and probably/perhaps Italian. This is reflected in the essay in the Yale photo-facsimile.
Driven by some specific questions and some new information, I asked Paula quite recently if this could also be Italian, but much later, say 18th - 19th century. She looked at it again with a colleague, and confirmed the earlier assessment.
You may want to check with her.
The reason for my questions was that this MS, and all others in the same collection, were rebound in Rome in the 18th-19th century, and some binding details of the others, as visible in the Vatican digital library, made me wonder whether the binding supports were also renewed.
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Thank you for the link, Rene.
Those last two pictures are startlingly different from each other. The tightness, width of the cording, amount of compression, symmetry... all different.
From the little we can see poking out the side on the VMS pic, it MIGHT be more similar to the upper pic rather than the lower one, but without a reveal of what is under the strip, it's really impossible to know.
Yes, it is easy to see the various differences, but I have no idea which details mean which particular thing in terms of location and time.
Furthermore, photos (even good ones) do not allow to identify the material as well as a close visual inspection.
On a side note, if you look at the second picture on this page:
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you can see the binding details from a microscope view on the TV screen. This is too fuzzy to help us now, but may illustrate how closely it was looked at then.
