The Voynich Ninja

One of the things that intrigues me most about the Voynich manuscript is the poor quality of its drawings. Whenever I’ve seen manuscripts from the 15th century or even later, the clumsiness of the Voynich illustrator is striking. The drawings are made almost in a single stroke, with no attempt at shading or adding the slightest grace to the figures. From the plants to the nymphs or the zodiac signs, they look like something a child of six or seven could have drawn.

I understand that by that time art had already reached quite a high level of quality; the Renaissance was just emerging in Italy in the 15th century. So whoever produced the illustrations must have been an amateur, and quite a poor one at that.

What is even more surprising is the contrast between the complexity of the text (whether it is an actual cipher or an invented script) and the low quality of the images. One senses the ambition to depict grand ideas, such as the elaborate foldout diagrams or the roses, yet the final result feels clumsy and impoverished when compared with the artistic standards of the time. I understand that the Renaissance was not accessible to everyone, but even the humblest artistic traditions of the period offered a more faithful representation of reality than what we see in the Voynich.

It is also striking that researchers have identified different scribes at work in the text, while the illustrations — at least the thematic ones — seem to share the same hand and style. It is difficult to imagine two people independently drawing the nymphs, for example, in exactly the same (and equally unconvincing) manner with respect to human anatomy. This further reinforces the impression that the text and the images may have followed very different logics of production.

That said (and I hope not to offend, I’m a Voynich enthusiast myself!), I wonder whether any other manuscripts from the period show a similar poverty of representation, with drawings that are unrealistic and poorly proportioned.

(08-09-2025, 08:28 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That said (and I hope not to offend, I’m a Voynich enthusiast myself!), I wonder whether any other manuscripts from the period show a similar poverty of representation, with drawings that are unrealistic and poorly proportioned.

I'm an amateur at this, but I've checked a few hundred digitized manuscripts when looking for astrological charts, so I suspect that almost all of them were of the same poor quality.

I guess the thing is: we are not that much interested nowadays what these manuscripts say, unless it's something of historical importance. So the manuscripts that get studied, digitized and published are either of some historical importance or art masterpieces of the time. So our expectation of what average quality of drawings to expect from a medieval codex is way above the actual baseline. Among the digitized and actively circulated online, yes, the Voynich MS is an ugly duckling. Among the actual codices of the time, I would guess the artwork is probably ok-ish.

But I've never held a medieval manuscript in my hands, so let's see what people with more exposure to actual manuscripts say.

I'm pretty sure you're right. All kinds of biases lead to an overexposure of the most beautiful examples. Not only modern biases, I presume. How much more likely is an expensive book of hours to be kept and properly maintained, compared to some obsolete notebook with doodles?

As an imperfect parallel, think of the way we look at paper encyclopedias now. With the rise of Wikipedia, second-hand bookstores were inundated with them. From one day to the next, they had become completely obsolete. 

My point with this example is the following: a book that was once appreciated, may become a useless burden to the next generation, and hence be discarded or lost. It is only some generations later that appreciation for the object returns due to its antiquity. 

In the arts, this happened to an extreme degree with wall tapestries. Once a popular form of decoration, at some point they fell out of fashion and had to go. Some of our most precious remaining examples were preserved by accident.

Especially relevant for the Voynich is probably the genre of "Hausbuch", which I assume must have undergone the fate of the encyclopedia at some point. There are all kinds of awful drawings in those, but I assume the prettiest ones had the best chance of survival.

It is definitely true that we have "survivality bias" - manuscripts that survived were mostly the prettiest ones. Nobody cared with ugly ones.

By the way, I have recently learnt that we have similar bias with open-air folk museums that exibit different kind of peasant houses. When you watch these houses you may get false impression that they are quite pretty and spacious and that peasant's life wasn't that bad. The problem is that houses which survived generally belonged to rich peasants. They were prettiest, biggest, most sturdy and best kept of. And  all these dirty, collapsing, rat-infested shacks where most people live simply didn't survive.

My feeling is that Voynich Manuscript immediately after creation was something very private and homemade so it didn't have standards of prefessional manuscript.. And in the early days it wasn't famous and known, if it belonged to some king or some abbey then it would probably draw interest and we would have some early mentions of it. But it appears in public only at rhe court of emperor Rudolf, over 150 years after its creation.

Another possibility is that it was a fake made for Rudolf, but it's another story.

(08-09-2025, 08:28 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the things that intrigues me most about the Voynich manuscript is the poor quality of its drawings. Whenever I’ve seen manuscripts from the 15th century or even later, the clumsiness of the Voynich illustrator is striking. The drawings are made almost in a single stroke, with no attempt at shading or adding the slightest grace to the figures. From the plants to the nymphs or the zodiac signs, they look like something a child of six or seven could have drawn.

The Scribe who actually put the text to parchment seems to have been fairly skilled with the quill, but apparently only at writing.  It seems that the VMS, and specifically the Zodiac pages, was the first job where he had to also draw figures. The Aries and Taurus pages seem to have been the earliest ones, and his "artistic ability", i we may use the term, clearly improved at each page.   At first he would draw each nymph with the lower half of her body strategically hidden inside a "tub", and the upper half fully dressed.  Or maybe he drew her torso naked at first, but then, a belated pang of prurience, went back and drew dresses over them.  Only after the first 3-4 pages he became bold enough to draw them fully naked, and developed the stereotypical pose that he would use for the rest of the job.

In style and skill, the Pisces illustration seems to be later than the first Aries, and possibly was drawn after the second Taurus. It is peculiar in several ways.  In It lies on the last page of the previous quire,  is a single diagram with 30 stars (actually 29 sectors, but an extra star and label at the center; probably a mistake),  has has the "tubs" turned into horizontal "pipes" or "barrels", etc.  I imagine that the scribing of that section must have been rather messy, possibly including a discarded first version of Pisces, and a change in layout being forced by shortage of parchment.

To his credit, the scale of text and drawings is quite small ("Objects in screen are smaller than they appear"), and the parchment must already have been rather rough and warped at the time.  I am not sure that one could do much better in those circumstances.

In other sections his artistic ability is much better, but he never got to fully master the art of perspective, or learn how to draw nymphs in more varied poses.  For instance, cylindrical objects like roots or flowers are drawn with the body in side view but withe the visible end shaped either as a circle or as a football, rather than an ellipse.

All the best, --jorge

I can't be the only one thinking I'd probably make even uglier drawings, even if I tried my best... right? No part of my 5-year old's drawing brain would even think of articulating the legs of bulls, correctly or not. Or attempt to draw faces in something as ambitious as a 3/4 view.

(08-09-2025, 08:28 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the things that intrigues me most about the Voynich manuscript is the poor quality of its drawings.
[..]

Would not say that.
On my last way step-by-step through the VMS' pages I noticed that there are only very few mistakes and corrections not only in the the texts, but also in the drawings.
I do not refer to the work of the "retracer" (and scribbler) who brought his contribution authorized some some ~20 minutes or just for fun 200 years later, or somewhere within this timespan.
The very most elements are drawn in a one-stroke manner with quite a sure hand -- I noticed that when I just tried to redraw some unused areas of the tents at "map" and other elements there.
The scale and size does not matter so much: medieval draftsmen were trained to paint miniatures into capital letters, so the size of VMS drafts may not be quite as challenging as we might see it today.

At all, VMS looks more to be hastily and carelessly written and drawn - several lines of texts are dangerously dropping as all writers refused to use auxiliary lines or just a ruler, and also there are circles which look more like an accident and were not made with the help of a circle, meanwile other elements were.
This may point to VMS being a low-quality, economy-class product with production time as crucial problem.

(08-09-2025, 08:28 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.From the plants to the nymphs or the zodiac signs, they look like something a child of six or seven could have drawn.

The 3x2 sheet looks to me to be quite good. Nothing that children could have done.

The difference in the quality of the sections suggests the possibility that they were written in stages and not in one go. Perhaps also that the earlier sections are the better quality ones, with the 3x2 sheet coming first, and with the quality declining as the author(s) started to loose enthusiasm.

(08-09-2025, 08:28 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.From the plants to the nymphs or the zodiac signs, they look like something a child of six or seven could have drawn.

Some details -- like the playful variation of dresses, hats, hairdos, and "tub" decorations in the first Zodiac pages, and the bath antics in the Bio section -- do give the impression that the Scribe indeed had the mind of a child under 10.  

On the other hand, the handwriting and skillful "driving" or the pen seem to imply that the Scribe was at least in his early teens.  By that age I already could produce neat handwriting when I wanted to, and could make drawing as complicated as any in the VMS, with details just as small, even using a steel pen.  (Besides, an age in early teens would be consistent with his fondness for naked nymphs...)

On the third hand, in my early teens I could paint with tempera much better than the VMS Painter(s) did.  I am sure that the original Scribe could do the same.  That is one of the reasons why I believe that the painting was done much later than the scribing and drawing.

Anyway, the Scribe clearly was no Archimedes.  I already noted his inability to properly draw cylinders and plants in perspective.  But it seems that he had not yet learned the concept of "measurement", and that he felt that "horizontal", "vertical", "straight", "parallel", and "equidistant" were sophisticated notions that did not apply to his profession.

He appears to have used a compass to draw the circles in the Cosmo and Zodiac sections.  I think I can see a pinhole at the center of several diagrams, where the dry point of the compass should have been planted.  But the radii seem to be all different, and the circles are not always concentric.  Moreover some diagrams are oversize and/or off-center so that they run into the folds of the folio.   

The traces of those circles may have been in some sort of pencil rather than ink; either they were very thin and light to start with, or they have mostly faded away.  (Several parts of those circles were visibly retraced in free hand at later times.)  However the original circles often fail to close, missing their starting points by a millimeter or more; possibly because the parchment moved and warped during the operation.

He obviously did not even try to plan the filling of the Zodiac circles.  A decent illustrator would have divided each band into the necessary number (5, 10, or 20) or equal sectors, and then would draw each nymph within her allotted sector.  Instead our Scribe started drawing nymphs around the 12:00 position and went clockwise, drawing each nymph without regard for its position or width.  Only when he got past the 06:00 position he started squeezing the nymphs more and more in an attempt to fit the required number.  An attempt that often failed, hence those nymphs "standing out of the door" atop the diagram. 

The same disregard for uniformity and/or inability to divide the circle in N equal parts is visible in several Cosmo diagrams.  He could divide circles into 4 or 8 parts, but the latter often had unequal size.  On some diagrams it looks like he intended to draw N rays or sectors; but, as in the Zodiac, just went on drawing sector after sector with no plan, and ended up with N-1 or N+1 sectors.   Where the plan was to have an even number of sectors alternating between two styles, this error created a "collision" at the end, which he apparently fudged in some clumsy way.

On page f67v1, for example the Sun at the center has 18 rays, but there are only 17 radial text lines, one of them seemingly shared by two rays at ~02:00.  Does that discrepancy have some cosmological significance, or was it just another blunder by the Scribe?

All the best, --jorge

The main reason why the drawings are considered of poor quality is the painting.

Had the MS not been painted at all, the drawing quality would have hardly stood out as being 'poor'.
The herbal drawings are far better and more detailed that those in alchemical herbals.
The cirdular diagrams are not worse than others in contemporary manuscripts.

The only remaining poor aspects are the human figures. This is primarily due to the heads/faces, and in second place due to the bad proportions, again caused by the heads.

Look at the clothes of a well-illustrated manuscript, for example here:
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It is a typical example where the painter uses different shades of the same paint to create a sense of depth. This is a completely normal thing to do in the 15th century, and it is also completely absent in the Voynich MS.