The Voynich Ninja

Hi!

This is my first post, I am not a color expert, I am not a statistician, but I do have some interesting data that someone more qualified could expand upon. 

In some of the recent YouTube videos by Koen, it was argued (I thought very persuasively) that the scribes also painted the paintings. This made me wonder: can we see a difference in what colors are used on the flowers? Can this be used to determine if the color is original or if it was added later?

My contention is the following:
(a) if the color was added later, there would be no difference in coloring between Herbal A and Herbal B, since a later painter would not know the difference.
thus,
(b) if there is any noticable difference in how color is used between Herbal A and Herbal B, it must mean that the color is original.

I conducted a very simple test. I separated all paintings of flowers into Herbal A or Herbal B on voynichese.com
I then asked a simple question: "what colors are found on the page?" and did a simple "yes/no" for each color I found.

I grouped it the following way:

[attachment=9376]

It is very simple, and not very precise, but having gone through every image of flowers in Herbal A and Herbal B, I did find some striking results:

Herbal A colors:

[attachment=9377]

Herbal B colors:

[attachment=9378]

As you can see, there is a stark difference between the usage of the color red. 

The only pages where Herbal B uses red are: f40v, f46v, f55r, and f95r1. 
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. might actually be brown and not even red.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. only uses a miniscule amount of red, if not a very reddish brown. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. uses a reddish brown again.
f95r1 is the only Herbal B where I feel that red is definitely used, and it is only small dots. 

Compare that to the use of red (or very reddish brown) which is used extensively, on basically half of all pages, in Herbal A.

This indicates at the very least that the scribe of Herbal B didn't like red. Or perhaps that Herbal B wasn't completely finished, since there is white on almost every single Herbal B page, and maybe red was only used as a finishing color(?). 

In any way, speculation aside, there is a clear, stark difference in the usage of the color red between Herbal A and Herbal B. This could not have been the case if the color was added later by someone who didn't know the difference between Herbal A and Herbal B. 

My humble conclusion, therefore, is that the color was added by the scribes. I am sure that someone better equipped to do these kinds of experiments could find even more robust research. I am not very good at these things.

Thank you for reading.

Welcome to the forum! Nice to see another color enthusiast here.

The difference in the usage of red was first pointed out by Sam G in 2016, and I included it in the video as well as an earlier blog post: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Note that this post was written before Cary and I found all the other differences between the herbal A and Herbal B drawings.

Around that time I also looked into other colors in the way you did, but I distinguished more shades by sampling color values in Photoshop. I vaguely remember writing about this somewhere but I'm not even sure about that. My conclusion was that only red shows remarkable differences. All the other colors (even special shades of green) don't discriminate between A and B. 

I'm not sure which conclusions to draw from this. Red points to something about the painting process being 'aware' of different groups of herbal images. But every other color points to a more uniform painting process...

I was also thinking about using a larger variety of shades of colors, but I thought that it would be basically impossible to distinguish between a shade *because the painter wanted a shade* and a shade *for any other reason*. 

What I did consider during my brief session was to simply compare how often more than one clearly distinguishable shade occurs on plants. 

I think that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the best example I can think of. 

Comparing different colors between different pages can be very difficult: every time they mix new paint, it can be difficult to get the correct ratio and correct painting.

But You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is one coherent plant, one piece of artwork, and yet it has many different shades. It is clear that whoever painted it wanted there to be different shades on the plant. It is not an accident that all the petals have different colors: it is not because they ran out of color, it is not because of loss of color over the centuries. 

With all of that said, I do think that, if others who are much better at color and statistics than me, will agree that there is a difference in the usage of red (or any other color), then that is clear evidence that the color is original, because, as I argued above, no one not familiar to the painting process would have made any distinction between the plants in Herbal A and Herbal B. Any difference, whatever it may be, is a strong indication that the painters also added the color (which makes sense logically and is sort of Occam's razor what we would expect anyways). 

I'm still not at the point of "so what does red mean?" That is a completely different question and I don't know enough about the manuscript yet. I heard somewhere that it's actually chanting and I sort of liked that idea, but I'm also inclined to it being complete gibberish. Anyways, I think that the difference in color use between the scribes must be clear indication that the color is original.

The question of the originality of the colors is one of the more complex one surrounding the manuscript, in my opinion. What if the drawings were originally uncolored? What if they had only some basic colors and others were added later? What if some were overpainted? 

Personally I prefer to think that they are original. But there are some indications to the contrary. I think Rene will know more about this.

Thank you very much for your input! I will think some more about other aspects of the Voynich manuscript and maybe I'll stumble across something else that's interesting! Thank you very much!

Alright! Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions, it can all be a bit overwhelming in the beginning.

Your research is interesting, but your question is problematic.

"Was the color original?" Original as opposed to what? Did the scribes paint the VMs Herbal sections? Was the scribe the artist who drew the illustrations. Was the artist also the painter? There are apparently two scribes for the two herbals, but were there two different painters, or a single person working at different times under differing conditions? Did each of the five scribes do their own drawing and painting?

I doubt that these questions will have verifiable answers.