I have some ambiguous picture again.
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Would you agree that in You are not allowed to view links.
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12" written in the roots in quite modern way?
Was it discussed before?
I agree that it's not impossible that this is indeed a 12. But could be some specks of paint or dirt. Note that judging by the width of the nearby strokes the whole 12 is ~2 mm across.
I'm not sure what to discuss here? Even if it is a twelve, I doubt anything can be extrapolated from this.
(13-04-2026, 03:39 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree that it's not impossible that this is indeed a 12. But could be some specks of paint or dirt. Note that judging by the width of the nearby strokes the whole 12 is ~2 mm across.
I'm not sure what to discuss here? Even if it is a twelve, I doubt anything can be extrapolated from this.
If it's a 12, it means that someone wrote european style numbers on the manuscript before the colours were added. That may have implications for the potential original culture of the VMS artist and/or its provenance.
I see an artefact of a vague 12, could be paint that was not deliberate. However I give it a 50/50 chance it was on purpose. Great spot!
If you notice the 1's and 2's are different on the pages so this could be big.
(13-04-2026, 07:20 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If it's a 12, it means that someone wrote european style numbers on the manuscript before the colours were added. That may have implications for the potential original culture of the VMS artist and/or its provenance.
There are already quite obvious European letters aka painting instructions on a number of folios.
Quote:I'm not sure what to discuss here?
We could ask who did it and what it could mean.
I am not any kind of expert but it looks for me not like medieval hand but something written in more modern script.
On the other hand it seems to be under the paint.
I cannot make much sense of it at the moment, maybe that's why I am asking
Also, I don't think it's possible for a non-expert in paleography to identify from the scans alone which layer of centuries old ink or paint is on top of which. Naively, one may think that if only part of a glyph is visible, the other part is hidden under the paint, however to me an equally plausible explanation is that the ink on top of a thick layer of paint had nothing to bind to and flaked off with time. As it could have happened in the notorious case of a green (?) speck of paint over a folio number. If we assume iron gall ink for the folio numbers, this type of ink binds to and reacts with the vellum. The part of ink that was on top of a grain of some mineral had nothing to react with, could have dried out and turned to dust, leaving an impression of paint added after the ink. I'm not saying it was one way or the other, but the possibility is there.
There are similar black artifacts to the left. So either it must all be seen as meaningful or, more likely, as noise.
The supposed 12 is so small that it would almost fit in the curved pen stroke at the top of that root.
(13-04-2026, 08:36 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If we assume iron gall ink for the folio numbers, this type of ink binds to and reacts with the vellum. The part of ink that was on top of a grain of some mineral had nothing to react with, could have dried out and turned to dust, leaving an impression of paint added after the ink.
Iron-gall ink not only binds to the vellum, but turns into an insoluble polymer as the iron in it oxidizes. If the ink had been applied over the paint, the paint pigment particles would have been embedded in that polymer. I suppose that it is not what Rene and others saw when they looked at that page number with the microscope.
All the best, --stolfi
(14-04-2026, 03:47 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If the ink had been applied over the paint, the paint pigment particles would have been embedded in that polymer.
Maybe, I don't know. Maybe the ink won't stick to the paint grains at all. Maybe the polymer would decompose after a hundred years. Maybe the polymer unattached to the vellum was scrabbed off by friction of the adjacent folio. What I'm saying is without the expertise and experience comparing hundreds of manuscripts one can't definitively identify the order of layers just by looking at a scan of a centuries old manuscript. If there is an actual 12 written on this root (which is not very likely, but not impossible as far as I can see), I can't see how one can tell, just by looking at the scan, if it was there before the paint.