(20-11-2025, 03:27 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.No matter how much I enlarge the font, I cannot see any darker font underneath.
The underlying traces are not darker, they are
lighter.
Here is another clip of the same page, with some notable details labeled.
[
attachment=12509]
The legend for that image is You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.. But here is an expanded version of the most important points:
First, consider the glyphs (A). Whether you accept the Retracing Theory (RT) or not,
that is what the original traces can be like. That is what a hypothetical brown writing under the red writing could look like.
If RT is true, those glyphs (A) were not retraced because they still looked OK at the time. So imagine what the glyphs that
were retraced would have looked like. And what they would look like today.
Evidence that the brown writing was retraced is not just the darkness difference between (A) and, say, (B). It is also plumes like (K) whose upper parts were retraced slowly and in the wrong direction (clockwise) and thus became thicker at the wrong end and fail to connect smoothly to the body and the start of the plume. Or the "weirdo" glyph (J), that must have been originally an
y, but whose left half has vanished completely and thus was omitted by the retracer.
Now to the red ink. As I wrote above, I am
not sure that there was a brown version under it. But if there was, it probably was original, and hence as faint as the (A) glyphs.
Evidence that the red ink is a late retracing includes the mangled glyphs (U) and (V), and the wrongly traced plumes (N), (O), (Y) and the loop (X). At (X) and (W), there are breaks between the horizontal branch, the loop, and the right leg of the
k, indicating that they were traced as three separate strokes, rather than a single stroke as usual.
At (T) there is a dot in brown ink in the middle of the red text ring. What is it doing there? (There is another one outside that clip, at ~11:00. That one seems to be the tip of the plume of an original
Sh that was retraced in red as
ee, skipping the plume and ligature; and then the tip of the plume was retraced in brown, as an isolated dot.)
Finally, (L) is one of several spots where the red ink flaked off, leaving a light "ghost". Is that ghost light brown, or light pink? If the latter, is it original brown ink, like (A), or a brown stain left by some component of the red ink? I cannot tell; the resolution of the BL 2014 images is too low. I wish the multispectral set had included at least one image of this page. Or that McCrone had taken a microscope image of the red writing...
And this is still only some of the evidence I see, just in that clip. And there is more on the rest of the page. And there are many other pages where the evidence of restoration, retouching, and defacing is much clearer and stronger. Like that Habsburg crown in the Zodiac...
Quote:Give me facts, not hypotheses.
I can say the same...
All the best, --stolfi