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Everyone thinks differently.
If I only consider the medicine and the bands of clouds, floating on a cushion above a nymph, then for me there is only one possibility.
A medical detail.
I'm not saying it is <or is not> a religious text of any sort. However, the VMs apparently does contain illustrations that can be interpreted by Christian tradition. It has also been discussed as to whether other VMs illustrations are suggestive of a classical interpretation. I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the artist's sophistication - in artistic structure and in trickery. The artist "tricks" the modern reader by using lost and obfuscated historical information.
There are (at least) three crosses in the VMs and the Agnus Dei makes a fourth Christian reference. What additional examples are found in the VMs?
How about the Fieschi popes??
Not sure there is an answer, but is the animal meant to be green?
Obviously the bottom nymphs have purposefully green on their hair, but all the other nymphs on this side of the page have green hair too, in the same washed out lightly done way, where as the right side has the normal yellow. There could be a reason for it, but the green crown(?) seems weird. I'm starting to wonder if the brush/paint just got dirty and they rolled with it, tried to do everything a bit lightly and hope it looks good enough. "Surely in hundreds of years loads of nerds won't analyse this.."
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(25-11-2025, 11:20 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Not sure there is an answer, but is the animal meant to be green? Obviously the bottom nymphs have purposefully green on their hair, but all the other nymphs on this side of the page have green hair too, in the same washed out lightly done way, where as the right side has the normal yellow. There could be a reason for it, but the green crown(?) seems weird. I'm starting to wonder if the brush/paint just got dirty and they rolled with it, tried to do everything a bit lightly and hope it looks good enough. "Surely in hundreds of years loads of nerds won't analyse this.."
I still don't know whether the light yellow paint (that is used everywhere, not just on nymph's hair) was applied very late, at the same time as the other paints, or in a separate earlier time, maybe by the original Scribe himself. Perhaps some of both.
Assuming it is contemporaneous with the green paint, your explanation above is surely correct. There are other pages where the transition between two colors is gradual, just as expected from an improperly cleaned brush. f5v, f10r, f23v, f29r, f29v, f40v, f53r, f69r, f69v, ...
Some of these gradients may have been intentional, but they do not seem to follow any logic (like "bottom leaves more yellowish"). And most plants and diagrams are painted with solid uniform colors. As if the painter had not yet grasped the idea that paints should be mixed to obtain the desired hue and shade.
In fact, most of the paint seems to have been applied with a broad-tipped quill or with a very bad brush, like a stick with the tip chewed or wrapped in cloth. Even the places where the paint seems uniform were probably covered with very runny paint, spread out in a big shallow puddle.
So it is possible that the painter did not use semisolid paints, but instead runny paints in bottles, like colored inks. In that scenario, mixing colors would be quite impractical -- except by "dirty brush" incidents.
[Should this go to another thread?]
All the best, --stolfi
I agree about the dirty brush thing. I found it most obvious in some Zodiac pages, where you can even determine the order of painting: blue to yellow, because there are "dirty" stars close to blue surfaces. So we can even see which stars they painted first after the blue.
Stolfi, if you'd like to make a thread about this phenomenon, that might be interesting. I don't remember having discussed it before.
For the intended color, a crucial piece of information is that they used the same for one of the Aries. This looks líke green, but may have been intended as some kind of grey?
Something interesting on Aries is it looks like they first thought they would paint it blue (by nose), then decided to change, I'm wondering if they changed to yellow and ended up with dirty green. Though it is pretty noticeable.. then again it is pretty noticeable with the stars too.
Another thing that I noted was the "green Aries" is on blue grass(?) and it looks to be the only one. So I guess like You are not allowed to view links.
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Also, on white Aries we have this nymph - Note the pattern on barrel
[edit] - Doing a "looks like" thing here, but just thinking logically.. Aries, start of spring, spring showers - rain? Not just for this pattern on the barrel, but the 80v image and Aries "blue grass"
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What is your interpretation of that particular nymph and the pattern on her barrel? Is it an engrailled chief, or a window with clouds and rain?
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No clue, but I think it might mean whatever they meant by curve-line-dot in these places too
At least that's my best guess atm
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Scallop-line-dot is one of those things I've wanted to look into for a while now but never got around to. Once you know it, you see it in a lot of places. Scallop or dot can be omitted, and for example line-dot can repeat, but it's always in this order.
I have a very specific parallel in mind, based primarily on the two-birds page, but I hope nobody finds this before I get around to writing about it properly :p
I started building a spreadsheet of all wavy+line and wavy+line+dot. The problem is it is in many more places than I hoped..
However the key thing I found, which might just be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, right? But..
On the ROS we have 9 circles, with 8 "bridges" between that have the wavy lines, so 16 sets of wavy lines, 15 of then have wave+line, 1 has wave+line+dot.
The unique thing about this one is it is the only one that doesn't make it from one circle to another, it is blocked by a "wall".
So that made me think maybe the dot is like "full stop", but a splash if a wave, or an echo if sound.. or whatever.. or just "stop", but it could be anything. I was hoping a collection of them happening might build a picture.
From something I wrote about before, it would make sense for "splash".. but you are safe for a while I think. I have nothing too compelling in mind