The Voynich Ninja

There seems to be a sentiment that it is especially the painting that makes some pages of the manuscript look rather "ugly." 

The guy who did the lines wasn't too bad at his job. But then he or his colleague (or someone else entirely) came along with a large, bad painting brush and ruined various perfectly good drawings. 

I was inspired by Rene's comment in another thread to take a look at places where the lines and the paint appear to tell a slightly different story. Just to name something, if You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. hadn't been sloppily painted, we would see more clearly that the horizontal cylinder te person is holding on to has two vertical bars as well. In this case, it seems clear that the linework was done first, and then the painting. The opposite would have been weird and impractical.

But then I saw You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Note how there is no actual outline of the leaves. If this was an uncolored sketch, the leaves would only be suggested by the "hooks" lining their edges. Could this suggest that the leaves were painted first, and then the hooks were added? Or that the hooks were drawn with the full knowledge of how they would be painted later? This suggests a close coordination between line and color. 

Why is this important?
Well, take a look at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for example. The blue one was originally drawn with a long tail, which is entirely painted over. The tail being entirely submerged seems unlikely: the rest of the picture suggests shallow water. 
If we assume the painter was either the line artist himself or his colleague, this would leave open the option of self correction. For example, maybe they wanted to draw a hippo and someone told them that hippos don't have such long tails, so they painted over it.
If, however, we assume the painter was some independent, manuscript ruining oaf, the self correction option would be ruled out entirely.

In the plant with the hooked leaf margins, the painting is fairly rough and we don't know if it's accurate. Perhaps if the original illustrator had painted it, they would look less like clothing hanger hooks and might have curved-serrate edges.

It's hard to tell, but it does appear as though the paint was added after the lines, and the painter may have guessed.

Koen,
This work was first done, I think, by Nick Pelling, and since his book was published in 2006, it has become fairly common knowledge that the precision of the colouring is not that of the drawings.  In some cases (again refer to Pelling's work which was the original), this may be due simply to an indifference to the lines as boundaries. (We see the same thing all the time in printed fabrics, for example).  In other cases, especially those which Nick describes as the 'heavy painter's' it looks much more a result of carelessness in some cases, deliberate attempts to obscure or subvert in other cases.

This is so well-known to older Voynicheros that I guess everyone supposes you will know its not some new insight, or any recent one, and so they forget to add that information - which of course led you to suppose that Rene was speaking of his own ideas.  It is a reminder to me, too, to be aware when speaking to newcomers that things we take for granted need to be properly atrributed to their authors, so that new-comers can go back to the original and see for themselves the argument that led to that point of view. Sometimes things become distorted by group mis-apprehensions, or just by careless re-phrasing, so knowing the original source is always a good thing, isn't it?

  Anyway, take a look at the comments on Pelling's site, and if you can get a copy of his book.  There are a lot of comments on things like the handwriting, and the codicology, that are now repeated just as routinely because they have become standard opinions.

Cheers.

Diane

Thanks for the references. So much has been written by so many people in such an unorganized way that it's not always easy as a newcomer to know which assumptions are deemed appropriate

So does this mean the manuscript was first intended to be uncolored? Or it was partially colored, and then at some places badly painted over?

This may explain why the forked tails were obscured in the water creatures (see the other thread I started). Maybe the second painter didn't find them appropriate.

Hi Koen Gh.,
As far as I know it would appear that only the yellow paint, and possibly some red, seems to have been added in the original version. As you will notice, the yellow paint is often applied in a rather precise and specific way, suggesting that the painter probably understood the text (see for example the yellow pot and belly of the person in the "der mus del" drawing). The greens and blues, and some reds, are another story...
There are various interpretations about why this green and blue paint job is so much sloppier than the drawing: I think it was JKP (?) who suggested that the painting quality is bad because it just didn't really matter. It is true that some other herbals are also sloppily colored, because the aesthetics of coloring just weren't that important for a technical reference book.
Personally, and until actual tests provide us with better answers about when the various colors were added, I tend to think that we cannot discount two possibilities: 1) that the blue and green and heavy red were added later, by someone who did not necessarily understand the text. 2) that they were added later by someone who did so in order to make things even more difficult to understand (Pelling's "obfuscation" theory). Either way, I personally don't rely on color at all for my views. There's more discussion of colors in the "green water" thread if you're interested, or as Diane suggested, Pelling's site.

This is one of so many things that nobody knows for sure.
The only safe approach is to keep the various different possibilities in mind.

Of course everyone can see that the painting is really bad in many places.
What is less obvious is that the outline drawings in ink (at least for the herbal part) are in many cases
quite detailed. Still, also this has been observed by many people independently.

There's a nice herbal (pseudo-Apuleius, 10th C, France) that remained unpainted, here:
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At least one of the alchemical herbals has painting that is as sloppy as that in the Voynich MS (Paris BN Lat 17844).

(15-03-2016, 01:11 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Koen Gh.,
...I think it was JKP (?) who suggested that the painting quality is bad because it just didn't really matter.

It must have been someone else who said that because I definitely don't look at it that way. I think two or more hands were involved in the painting. Some of them are carefully painted, not only in terms of the edges and flatness of the paint, but also in terms of carefully mixing colors to create different shades of green. At least ONE of the people involved in painting was making an effort to make it tidy and accurate.

To me, the VMS looks like an unfinished document. There are many signs of this, the embellished initial is missing from a thick-with-text page, the labels are missing from parts of the small-plants section, etc.


I think it's likely that the painting was never finished and someone else (or more than one someone else) either tried to finish the manuscript with less care and attention, or tried to increase its value by adding more color if they had thoughts of selling it (which may have happened in the years closer to when the VMS was created, in the years for which we have no provenance).