The Voynich Ninja

I do apologise for links, I have forgotten how to insert images so that they work. 

I started with the idea what the VM artist copied "[b]Title :  [/b]Liber de plantis. [b]Publication date :  [/b]1440-1460", but very badly / incorrectly.

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The foot placement being almost forcibly attached to the plant image, left foot on the right side of the roots drew me to this conclusion 

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In attempting to recreate/prove this copy and "mistake" that lead to the "downstairs mixup"  (I'm sorry I'm a mightyboosh fan and it was too tempting), I proved myself wrong. At least I believe I did. I would be interested to hear others thoughts. Either, the artist copied the feet first then realised their mistake in composition which made adding a tail cause all sorts of visual issues (initial thought), or they are trying to show one wing behind the other, and a "clubbed" tail. Which I now think is most likely. Either option shows the artist to be an amateur (not understanding which background lines to omit from foreground), and the "dragon" to be a "dragon", Not a dog, armadillo, ant-eater, ...cat(?!) or others that I have seen mentioned. It either has 2 wings and "clubbed tail", or a long tail, and artist messed up the foot then added a quick fix with the foot poking from behind belly, presumably to be rectified later (or they just didn't care), either in my opinion makes this a dragon.. or the most messed up bird..  

In the middle line of images I tried to recreate the image best I could with the VM artists thought process in mind when/if copying, obviously this is a destructive process, it was only done to try understand artistic choices/order of working, but ultimately lead me to believe this was not a copy. The need for the left foot of a dragon to be touching the right side of a root.. is quite a unique scenario though (I haven't seen elsewhere) and I would be shocked if that element of the composition wasn't copied / in the mind of artist. 

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If the links don't work let me know, and if you could remind me how to embed stuff so it works again Id be v much appreciative

Hmm, is the dragon really touching a root?
It's standing on a curvy line that looks fundamentally different than the roots and was painted green. And it emerges from a strange arch between the plant's stem and a leaf that makes no sense.

[attachment=12446]
[attachment=12447]

The lines look darker and Jorge will probably tell us this is the work of a later retracer.
In any case, it rather looks like the dragon is standing on flowing green water than on the roots. Water that comes from the stem or a root of the plant.

We all know which mortal enemy the dragon is looking for in the water

No seriously though, It could be water, which can be green in the VM (this works whether you believe in an original painter, a later painter or a paint parade). 

I guess it can also be part of the terrain, like is done for some of the Zodiac quadrupeds?

I'm getting a heraldic impression, various animals running up hillsides. Not common & not sure of specific info.

Damn imgur and all its old links breaking  
I'm not sure this was worth a whole new post so maybe it can go here too  Was just looking at this MS and noted the "dragon" looked rather familiar. 
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Italy 1460) - Also has some merlons, bathing, weird roots.. worth a bookmark

I am assuming it is a dragon, as the plant is listed as "dragontea" (I think)
Guessing it is this
[attachment=12457]

[attachment=12455]

[attachment=12456]

(18-06-2024, 11:42 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[BnF Gallica Latin 17848]
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Those pages are from a so-called Alchemist Herbal which seems to be another version of the one that was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Those two images you posted are Marco's #1 and #43. Both are plants that are claimed to be good for snake bites:

• #1 Herba Antolla minor / Antola minor: "...Take some of this herb, crush it, make a poultice and put it upon a bite; it immediately relieves the pain and removes poison. ..."
  
• #43 Herba Paroiscas / Paroischas / Paroyschas: "For healing a snake bite. Take this herb and plaster it on the bite; it removes pain and poison, and this is proven. Also, this herb has this virtue that if someone carries it with them, a snake cannot approach but flees when it smells the scent of this herb. ..."
  

The plant illustrations in Marco's version are similar to those you posted, but there is no dragon.  The text mentions snakes but not dragons.

It would be useful to see more examples of these "herbs" in other "Achemist Herbals".  Based on this massive corpus of two samples (and some of Marco's comments), I conjecture that in fact there was only one "Alchemist Herbal", which was copied, mutated, truncated, and augmented through hundreds of copies by hundreds of scribes.  Has someone read Toresella's book about them?

And I conjecture also that the original Alchemist Herbal was like Marco's, without dragons.  The dragons in BnF Lat.17848 were added by one of these scribes, somewhere along the chain of copying that led to that version.  At first it may have been a snake fleeing from #43 or vomiting in reaction to its smell. But I conjecture that, in the cottage industry that produced those books, the scribe who wrote the text was not the same person as the artist who drew the illustrations.  The former had to know Latin, the latter did not. Since he could not read the text, the artist responsible for the mutation thought that the snakes were only decorative and so he "enhanced" them to dragons spitting fire...

The scribe of VMS f25v, on the other hand, was responsible for the whole page, text and figures. I presume that he copied the text from the Author's draft, copied some parts of the plant (root,maybe leaves) from the Author's sketches or from the Pharma section, and made up the rest -- sometimes from his imagination, occasionally from plants from his garden, but often (as on f25v) by copying random elements from an Alchemist Herbal.  Which happened to have dragons, although rather different from those of BnF Lat.17848

Quote:Either option shows the artist to be an amateur

That is quite an understatement...

Quote:messed up the foot then added a quick fix with the foot poking from behind belly

Quite possibly. But I suspect that it was actually a later Restorer who misunderstood an half-erased tail and "restored" it as a third foot.  As you noted, the ink strokes on the whole dragon are thicker and darker than those on the plant.

All the best, --stolfi

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(18-11-2025, 05:08 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It would be useful to see more examples of these "herbs" in other "Achemist Herbals".  Based on this massive corpus of two samples (and some of Marco's comments), I conjecture that in fact there was only one "Alchemist Herbal", which was copied, mutated, truncated, and augmented through hundreds of copies by hundreds of scribes.  Has someone read Toresella's book about them?

Since I found one possible proto-"Alchemical herbal" ms. that has only two illustrated pages (herba Lunaria and I don't remember the name of the other one) I've been wondering too.

Toresella doesn't seem to have been able to find the exact source.

Translated by Marco Ponzi from Gli erbari degli alchimisti:

Sergio Toresella Wrote:The Origin of the Herbals of the Alchemists

Dating the herbals of the alchemists is not easy, and it is also very difficult to pinpoint the origin of their iconographic tradition. They all seem to be closely Italian because, with a couple of exceptions, almost seventy of these alchemical herbals were produced in Italy, primarily in northern Italy, in the Venetian region. Furthermore, while some of the herbs can be easily traced to the Corpus of Pseudo-Apuleius and the Circa instans, such as the herb "grias" (fig. 22), which is directly derived from Pseudo-Apuleius and remains unchanged in many herbals, it seems that the alchemists' herbal is an independent elaboration, perhaps occurring in the 13th century. However, there are no examples of these herbals preceding the mid-14th century, and their period of greatest diffusion is the 15th century, disappearing by the mid-16th century.

Bryce Beasley (thesis) Wrote:All alchemical herbals descend from one or more original manuscripts which drew from the same body of knowledge used to create the initial text(s) from which all subsequent alchemical herbals were copied.

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I managed to fish out some of the original images (just in case anyone is clicking the thread now and thinking what the hell - broken Imgur..). 
I think the idea was to see if I could reverse engineer the VM dragon into the other, to see if it might be "inspired by". I think I came to the conclusion that the front foot was not a mistake, but the back "foot" might be a clubbed tail, this plus the little wings makes them a bit different "dragons".. though they are not too dissimilar overall.

[attachment=12467]

I found this illustration online, unfortunately without a source reference. Maybe someone will find it.

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