(13-09-2026, 08:13 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (13-09-2026, 01:00 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But keep in mind that those nymphs are very small, about 20 mm tall. It is very hard to draw an anatomically correct human body at that scale, without first sketching it in pencil (a trick that Scribe obviously did not know). Trained artists like Leonardo (or even Taccola) could do it. A small-town accountant or lawyer probably could not.
One of the things I gradually realized is that things like very basic skeletal accuracy are a sign of skill, and they sit much lower on the ladder than you might think. Even in lower quality manuscripts, arms connect to shoulders, elbows work well and bulls' hind legs bend correctly.
Just for myself, I found it liberating to be able to say "this detail is probably the result of bad drawing" rather than having to find a cultural or compositional explanation for everything.
This does in no way imply that I think the drawings are meaningless. But both things can coexist: a poor artist trying to communicate something through drawings. But that something is not standard, even if we normalize for the effect of poor technique.
As for the background of the artist, one potential (of several) ideas I like is that he may have travelled as a student, as many did. When I was knee-deep in Taccola research, one of the things I learned is that he had a lot of contact with the students of the university in Siena. German (speaking) students were the largest groups of foreigners here, those who lived "above the mountains". And one of the hypotheses for the manuscript with the VM parallels is that it may have been available to students. (This is based on my recollection of an article I read at the time).
A common thread among several works we have marked as potentially relevant is their role in Italian pedagogy and education: De Balneis, La Sfera... In places like Florence, you would encounter these works at some point in the curriculum, especially when pursuing medical studies.
So, coming back to the earlier question, I believe one explanation for a diversity of influences is ironically that the person had (or was having) an education - just not one focused on illumination! I realize this point of view clashes with other popular options, like that the artist lived an isolated life or that they must have suffered from some form of mental issues.
Siena has a lot going for it, as does Padua, Pavia, Ferrara and Bologna.. I've build a lot of graphs of these places.. Ex and Consensus are really incredible for finding the existing research and then using an LLM to map the links, and the honest unsatisfying answer is that to some extent they're as likely as each other because people moved around a hell of a lot.. people started writing in one city and then finished in another.. it's very hard to distinguish.. my gut tells me Padua is still the most parsimonious, but I'm still building credentials.. (and btw, this isn't AI coming up with a solution, this is AI helping me sift through 10s of thousands of published papers based on hypotheses I'm feeding.. honestly, it's a game changer.. AI won't solve the Voynich, but I have a pretty good idea that it'll help narrow down the possibilities)
Especially when a lot of the research is in a language you don't master (Italian in my case), AI can certainly be useful in diligent hands.
Quote:As for the background of the artist, one potential (of several) ideas I like is that he may have travelled as a student, as many did.
I like "student hypothesis" and some time ago suggested it could be a student (or a group of students) but a "naughty" one, someone in a style of
goliards or
clerici vagantes who travelled a lot, had poor grades at school but was street-smart :
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I'd like to add one comment about the author skill and style. People often evaluated Voynich Manuscript on
Medieval vs Renaissance dimension. Even in recent thread we had the words of Panofski who considered VM to be "provincial" as it didn't show much traces of Renaissance.
I wouldn't agree that the author was someone unfamiliar with recent trends. We have strong hints that he knew the works of Taccola which are rather Renaissance or Renaissance forerunner. They contain shading, perspective and all this fancy stuff that changed between our epochs.
If we consider that carbon dating of VM ends in 1438 and Taccola manuscript appeared in late 1420s then our author made VM when Taccola work was very fresh and new. So he had access to recent styles and fashions.
If he knew Taccola, why he didn't draw like Taccola? The answer is simple for me -
he couldn't. He wasn't skilled enough. If we took a random, modern person and tell him to draw something like VM it will be probably equally poor even if our man has seen a lot of better stuff in his life.
Voynich drawings are "medieval" because medieval style is easier, not because our artist didn't knew Renaissance (he knew, he knew Taccola).
By the way, we have no idea if his style got better later or it was his limit. We only knew his skill at the moment he drew Voynich.
(13-09-2026, 06:58 PM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do we have any examples at all, of regular townsfolk or non-scribes (lawyer etc) penning an entire manuscript with illustrations?
It should be pretty clear by now that the Scribe (the guy who actually wrote the text and drew the outlines of the figures on the vellum) and the Author (the guy who devised the script, composed the text, and decided which figures should be drawn) are two distinct persons, with very different educations.
In my estimate, it took about one hour for the Scribe to do a typical page. Maybe half an hour for text-only pages; maybe 2-3 hours for Pisces or the central rosette. That would be 200-300 hours for the whole book. Therefore, if the Scribe worked two hours per day, 20 days per month, the whole book would be done in less than six months. If he worked 8 hours per day, it would be done in less than two months.
I still don't know how much the Author paid for the vellum (if he did not get it from free). I have seen an estimate of about US $1 per page in today's money; but I don't know what was the epoch, country, and quality. But let's take that as a working hypothesis. If that is all the Author could spend on the vellum, he probably could not afford to pay the Scribe more than that.
Is it plausible that the Scribe would work for US $1 per page? A professional book scribe (like a monk in an abbey with a "book factory") may have passed on that opportunity. But I suppose that there would always be people with writing experience who would take that money rather than nothing. In a small town, maybe even a notary or lawyer may welcome that supplementary income...
All the best, --stolfi
(13-09-2026, 08:13 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This does in no way imply that I think the drawings are meaningless. But both things can coexist: a poor artist trying to communicate something through drawings. But that something is not standard, even if we normalize for the effect of poor technique.
Agreed. The Scribe definitely did not choose the figures. The Author must have specified each figure to some degree. It could have been a more or less detailed sketch, or maybe only "copy this figure from this book, but change this detail here thus".
Quote:So, coming back to the earlier question, I believe one explanation for a diversity of influences is ironically that the person had (or was having) an education - just not one focused on illumination!
That is an interesting possibility!
But the Scribe was clearly ignorant of Euclean geometry, which was the basic math discipline at the time. So if he was a university student, he must not have been on any track that included it.
All the best, --stolfi
(13-09-2026, 08:52 PM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (13-09-2026, 08:08 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To me it looks like the author simply had no general idea what plants looked like IRL, so he made fatal flaws when interpreting drawings.
What kind of person has no idea what plants look like IRL? This seems to be a very strange person, indeed.
If you asked people today to draw from memory a detailed picture of some plant that is supposedly well known -- like a dandelion, a rose bush, a carrot or corn plant, even a palm tree -- eight of ten of the results would be as flawed as the VMS plants.
Our memory is a bizarre tool. You
think you can see in your mind a perfectly clear image of the staircase in your home, or the building of your school, which you have seen thousands of times from all possible angles. But try to bring up that mental image and count the steps in that staircase, or the windows in that building. You will find that you can't. (Unless you are one of very few people with "photographic memory".) And it is the same with other objects, like plants.
All the best, --stolfi
PS. One of the books I most enjoyed reading was
Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. I can see in my mind a clear image of the book's cover, the layout of the pages and chapter headings, even the fonts. I remember all the stories and even some memorable sentences. Only problem is, I cannot remember whether it was the Italian original or the English translation ...
(13-09-2026, 10:33 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:As for the background of the artist, one potential (of several) ideas I like is that he may have travelled as a student, as many did.
I like "student hypothesis" and some time ago suggested it could be a student (or a group of students) but a "naughty" one, someone in a style of goliards or clerici vagantes who travelled a lot, had poor grades at school but was street-smart :
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Yes, this is my current number one theory as well.. whilst there's no evidence of a Capstone project at Padua during this time, there is a lot of evidence for students collaborating and copying Manuscripts, so I see it as quite likely. But I've not yet found the smoking gun.. just a lot that points in that direction..
What would a smoking gun even look like?
Quote:What would a smoking gun even look like?
Yes, what do you expect to find?
Memoirs of some guy where he tells how he created Voynich Manuscript?
I believe if such thing existed it would be noticed by any modern man reading it. I think historians and librarians dealing with manuscripts are aware of VM existence and would connect the dots.
Okay, it may be in some forgotten manuscript in some locked chest in some library attic. But we don't check such stuff here. We check stuff that was scanned, placed online and somehow checked (in a more or less careful way) during scanning.
If any hints exist, they are probably more subtle.
You may get for example a medieval list of alumni of some university. I have seen such stuff. But what next?
(And if our man was a "bad boy" and dropped off school, he won't be among alumni)
So what could you find that would make a progress?