The Voynich Ninja

Looking at the flowers in the VM for quite some but not nearly enough time, I have made some interesting observations.
Following Koen's thread and blog post about differences in A and B plants, I also looked at different scribal hands as proposed to Lisa Fagin Davis.

Most plants were drawn by scribal hand 1 which  covers all of Currier A and also shows the greatest variability.
The Currier B pages are divided between scribal hand 2, 3 and 5

Scribal hand 2 draws the cleanest and most 'sophisticated' flowers, it is hard to describe but they have a certain vibe to it. This scribe appears to have the best drawing skills. Most 'VM-daisies' and the enigmatic rosette- like flowers of  f33v, 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. are drawn by this hand. But also some quite simple and messy ones like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or f31r.

Scribal hand 3 appears to be closer to 2 than to 1 and overall has pretty well drawn flowers.

Scribal hand 5 appears rather messy, closer to 1 than to 2.

The most bizarre feature is that while some plants of scribe 2 stand out, most plant drawings fall within the same spectrum of VM oddities and show very similar quirks and share patterns which I find very hard to explain if we assume these drawings were made by different people. When I learned botanical drawing at university (I was always terrible at it) I was baffled how differently students would draw the exact same plant before them. People not only differ in drawing skills but also perception and pay attention to or miss details that others don't. In the VM this mostly is not the case, on the contrary. Different scribes draw plants that have eerie similarities. Some appear to be copied but that again raises the question why different people would copy a plant or parts of plants and rearrange them.

So without further ado, let's look at some examples:

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Plant duplicates in the pharma section are well known but few have flowers or fruit. Here we see 2 clearly identical plants by scribal hand 1 except for the root system.

Also well known the 3 plants with thee red berries

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The same scribal hand 1 draws the same plant 3 times in the VM. Despite the slightly different leaves and bifurcated stem in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the missing terminal tendril and extra branch in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. we clearly see the strong similarities in root, leaves and fruit.

Let's look at the plant with campanula-like flower:

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It is drawn 3 times, 2 times by scribal hand 1 which are perfectly similar and once by scribal hand 5 which shows stylistic differences and a moderately different root but still is very recognizable.


My favorite are those strange flowers with bulbous calyx, no idea what this is supposed to be. 

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We again have 3 plants from 3 different scribal hands. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by hand 1 and f95r1 by hand 3 share extremely strong similarities down to the coloration of flowers. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by scribal hand 2 has somewhat different leaves and differently colored flowers but still it is hard to believe that this drawing evolved independently from the others. So we have 3 scribal hands bit extremely similar flowers.

From here things get a bit odd. Let's look at the 'mosses'

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Again 3 plants from 3 scribes. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by scribal hand 2 is an odd plant or rather an odd flower which doesn't match the plant at all which appears to be either a monocot or bryophyte. We find an almost exactly similar plant  with similar root table in f95r2 drawn by scribal hand 3 but instead of a flower it has capsules or sporangia typical for mosses. In comparison we have another 'moss' in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. drawn by scribal hand 1. It looks vastly different, has no root table and serrated leaves but the 'flower' appears to be a sporangium with a toothed peristome typical for a moss like Polytrichum. See more here:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

There is one more triad although more doubtful and strangely it contains the third plant on the foldout of f94v-f95r1-f95r2

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All 3 plants by scribal hands 1, 2 and 3 share a composite flower, arrow-shaped leaves arranged in a fan. The root system is less clear but vaguely similar. I do not believe these drawings necessarily depict the same plant but they share a common design. I am not really sure what to make of it. It should be noted that apart from the campanulas, all of the duplicate plants have at least 1 member in Q17.

Last but not least, we close with another peculiar composite plant where scribe 1 recycles overall plant shape and inflorescence but swaps out the leaves to a pinnate version.

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I find it highly likely that these 2 plants and especially the inflorescence are a copy, maybe even autocopy. There appears to be a general tendency to copy and recycle plant parts and my feeling is they were constructed from a stock of shapes or themes. This also would explain the similarities between some flower shapes and the rosette page.

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Honestly I really don't know what to make of all this but to me the most striking discovery are the similarities between scribal hands. Why did they draw such similar plants? Did they copy each other? Even then I find it hard to imagine how one would end up with such similarities. I think like with the text we must not make the mistake tho throw everything in the same pocket. The plants may very well have very different origins, some being faithful drawings of living plants, some copies or autocopies and others creations of imagination. Probably even a mixture.

One giant task would be to divide all VM plants into flower, leaves and root system and compare them independently as well as the overall plant shape. Also We should look for similar drawings in contemporary herbals, not necessarily in whole but at least in parts.

Some things first, just to clarify where I currently stand on the matter of scribes as artists.

Rene and Lisa told us independently that it would be clearer if we used a different naming system for the plant styles, to somewhat disconnect them from Currier languages. So I decided on alpha and beta, i.e. there is an alpha style and a beta style. Then there are conflicting plants, where something goes wrong with the system, and unmarked plants, which don't have clear dividing features.

One potential problem with the way we approached things is that we started out from Currier languages, so our efforts picked up on differences between these two groups. We showed that there are undeniable differences between both styles. 

Now, if we had started out from scribes, we may have found different properties still. We tried this though... We took our entire spreadsheet of over a hundred properties and sorted by scribe. We found a few things, but they are hard to work with since these other scribes are so rare. If something occurs only twice, it cannot be called a defining feature of a style. The only thing we found so far, if I recall correctly (we haven't even written anything down yet) is that these berry shapes with a "disk" attached to them, like in f94r, are a favorite in scribe 3's pages. It's not conclusive though, and not much to go on.

Overall, what I would say at this point is that the alpha style is found in scribe 1 pages, and the beta style in scribe 2 pages. The other scribes tend to have conflicting or barely marked pages. Or something like one marking feature expressed in an unusual way. I would probably go as far as saying that the alpha style and beta style belong to different artists, but it is unclear what happens in the in between zone.


Now your examples. 

1. This compares a herbal page to a pharma page. It seems clear that one of both sections relied at least in part on the other. Some roots from beta plants are copied faithfully in the pharma section. It is hard to compare these two for that reason. I need to put out the third part of the video, because we also talked about these things. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is relatively unmarked, but it has separate spikes on the roots, which is an alpha property, so this would be a conflict with the Currier language (B), but interestingly on a scribe 3 page.
   
2. Similar to (1): the relation between pharma (all scribe 1) and Herbal is complicated. As you pointed out, one difference is the weird stem base of f17v. We called this "unnatural connections", an alpha property. Interestingly, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has "separate spikes on roots", another alpha property. I hadn't noticed this yet. I have no doubt that these plants are indeed by the same artist.
   
3. F57r is from quire 8, a quire so bizarre that we singled it out for the second part of the video. This plant is a great example of the alpha style. If the alpha style is by scribe 1, then scribe 1 drew this plant and scribe 5 wrote the text (each paragraph in a different subdialect - Q8 is a mess!). 
   
4. The bottle-shaped calyxes with similar flowers... Yes, this is a very good observation, and we struggled with these. I agree with your view on them, and will add a few complicating factors.
   * You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a good alpha plant: stem-root line, stalks connect to leaf center. It also recurs in the Pharma section.
   * You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a good beta plant: root platform, grass, leaves on one side of the stem, somewhat beta-style leaves. It might also recur in the Pharma section (the blue thing on f99v), but much less clearly and more debatable. Now here's the weird thing: this is one of the very few B-folios to use red. And even more bizarrely, just like 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. it uses red and blue, but it switches them: red for the calyx and blue for the petals. What I hadn't noticed yet before you pointed this out, is that this flower borrowing coincides with a rare splash of red on a B page!
   * You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is unmarked. The use of red should point to A-folios, but this does not seem to apply to these foldouts at the end. This plant falls outside of our system (and happens to be by a rare scribe).
   
5. f39r is decent beta style, but with an atypical flower (although I guess it is in the daisy class?). f95r2 is interesting because it shows the one property that might betray scribe 3, which is the (dotted) disk attached to a bulbous shape, no petals. See your earlier example of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
   
6. I can't add much here, apart from the fact that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (again scribe 3) has a conflict: there appears to be an attempt at grass (beta) but the structure is clearly alpha (all leaves attach to one point, flower on top).
   
7. agree
   

In summary:
* Quire 8 is weird, there is a constant flux of scribes, languages and subject matter.
* I see no strong indication that scribe 5 did their own plants, in fact in Q8 it looks like the alpha artist did the plants
* it can be argued that scribe 3 did their own plants, or at least that those pages where Lisa indicates scribe 3 are also special plant-wise. We see awkward implementations of alpha/beta features, conflicts, ....
* You include several examples from the "50's", which is also where our system struggles the most.

Valid points.
I agree Alpha / Beta is a good naming to avoid confusion, also I should have clarified I meant plants drawn on pages assigned to scribes. We do not know if the same people drew the plants but there appears to be some pretty good correllation as you have shown, at least between Currier A and B. Also my approach was to mainly analyze the flowers, I have not found the time to extensively look at plants and roots.

I still think plants on scribe 5 pages differ stylistically (not in the term of Alpha / Beta) from those in scribe 1 pages but I need to look into it more It is hard to grasp.
Look at the 'Campanula'. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f102r2 on pages assigned to scribe 1 look extremely similar while You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. assigned to scribe 5 is much different and has some Beta-ish vibes. If this is the same plant, why is it reproduced much differently in the pharma-section? Or is it supposed to be a different plant? Interestingly, apart from the 'Campanula' on f102r2 I haven't found another flower in the pharma section that can clearly linked to the rest of the document while many roots can. There generally aren't much flowers depicted, they probably were not the active ingredient.

I disagree that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a daisy type it's not really a composite flower, i have classified such flowers as 'primula-type' together with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f94v. But the borders between single and composite flowers are fluent. I still think many flowers are fictitious or (auto)copied from diffferent stock parts. There is a continuum or evolution of odd flower shapes that is hard to come by if you draw real flowers.
I need to write up a post on the different components of VM flowers and how they were combined.

It would really be interesting to get an opinion of an art historian whether it can be assessed if the plants were drawn by different persons. If we accept that hypothesis, we struggle to explain how at least 2 but possibly up to 4 people came up with such similar styles even when copying each other or from a common source.

I have also been thinking, the quality of VM drawings is generally poor, yet after drawing a considerable amount of images the artist should have somewhat improved. Could this be what we are seeing in the different 'scribes' both in Currier A / B and Alpha / Beta plants? An evolution of imagery in connection with an evolution of the text wourld not be overly surprising.

On the other hand, the pharma section was likely drawn by the same artist, it has the same style. So it would have to been drawn before the Beta plants. Not sure how likely that is.

* Some Currier B plants' roots appear again in the Pharma section, notably You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f48v. Remarkably, these are by scribe 5, and don't have the strongest beta features (atypical ones). I think it may be possible that (some of?) scribe 2's folios were originally the last plant pages in the MS. Scribe 5's folios almost certainly not, unless the artist of f48 stole his roots from the Pharma section.

I just re-read your post and realized you point to another bridge between scribe 5, the Pharma section and Scribe 1. This is very interesting. Of all the B pages, those Lisa ascribes (no pun intended) to scribe 5 are the closest to alpha style and pharma. 

I do agree that the scribe 5 pages in Q8 appear different stylistically. The way You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. inhabits the page is quite bizarre, it is very tiny and compressed for this type of plant drawing. Still it has many alpha properties. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a harder case because it is kind of faded (?). It's hard to see what's going on. And it is one of the strongest alpha plants. Now if both scribe 5 and scribe 1 draw alpha plants, then what does this mean? Where do alpha properties come from? There are still many questions and possible scenarios, but I find these things fascinating.


* I don't think the beta style presents itself as more "experienced" than the alpha style. If anything, the alpha style is more detailed (veins) than the beta style. The latter has got weird things going on like the leaf shape and the way leaves may be on one side of the stalk. The attention for terrain (grass, root platforms) to me personally feels like a different focus/approach rather than a qualitative improvement. In a way it's even a drastic departure from the isolated plant approach, but not necessarily the kind of thing that comes with experience.

I should really finish editing the last part of the video, since we talked about many of these things.

I think it is premature to conclude that scribes drew their own plants, although I think it likely and worth pursuing (I'm working on this, as are Koen and Cary and others).