The plant on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a weird one, but that goes without saying. I have no idea of what it could be; but just came across an image in the Leiden Dioscorides "f094a" which reminded me of it. Note how the saw-like leaves extend horizontally and the way they overlap to form one surface. This alone wouldn't be enough, but there's also a similarity in the screen-shape of the flowers. Even the arrangement of the roots is similar, although the VM has more of them. Unfortunately I don't read Arabic so I don't know which plant this is.
First to clear away a few chronic anachronisms and likely misapprehensions
1. We can do away with any notion that the Vms' drawings are the work of a European 'artist' or even of a European architect.
The dates 1404-1438 (give or take a couple of years) set the Vms in a period before the 'artist' was other than an artisan, who learned his craft from the basics up, and it is a basic law of iconography and provenancing that muscle-learning cannot be unlearned. In other words, just as someone who spent ten years in school, hand-writing every day cannot get their hand to 'unlearn' how to write, even if they try to imitate a baby's efforts, so too no-one who had been trained in medieval Europe as a painter of manuscripts, paintings etc. could undo it. Same for a Renaissance architect - who could not 'forget' how to think in terms of three-dimensions and perspective. Similarly the artisan was not trained to indulge in 'self-expression' and such importance for an individual was hardly stressed in the way we imagine natural today in our own society.
2. Professional techniques co-incide, not overlap. That is, a scribe might use herringbone stitch to mend a parchment, and a seamstress might use the same technique for a hem, but that doesn't imply that either had any knowledge of the other's professional-technical area.
Right - so there are three distinct professions and one - writing in gold - which might overlap with a couple of the others in using techniques involving scratching or cutting through - we tend to call it all by the same word, 'sgraffito'. The separate activities are:
(i) building - making pretty patterns on the exterior by adding one or more layers of paint or render and then cutting through or scratching to create patterns: we'll call that architectural sgraffito. It has a long tradition in the west, but though very often imagined responsible for every use of sgraffito in Europe, it was quite a separate thing - a folk-custom, pretty much, which some Renaissance people picked up again for their buildings because they imagined it a relic of ancient Romans or Greeks.... which in a way it was.
(ii) Separately from this, pottery decoration developed a cutting or scratching technique which we also call 'sgraffito' but this type is attested first in Asian ceramics by about the 7thC. Certainly by the 10thC we find it in Nishapur, and it was something of a mad 'rage' in the Mediterranean - first in trade centres such as Fustat and in the eastern Mediterranean. It is certainly found in close connection with Sankai (3-colour) glaze in Nishapur, Fustat and Corinth before the end of the 12thC and it was immensely popular to the fourteenth. It is safe to date its peak of popularity from the mid-12thC to the 14thC, in Byzantine and in Islamic regions. There's more one might say, including the possible depiction of a sankai glaze in the Vms' root-and-leaf section, but I'll leave the ceramic part at that
(iii) painting: though we find folk-art use of e.g. drawing through varnish or through paint - notably in Spain, sgraffito really came into its own in European painting during the 'Mongol century' as the newly-opened routes east brought in return - principally through Genoa and, to a lesser extent through Venice, the most stunning fabrics made of silk-brocade, gold-woven brocades and various others whose technical names I won't bore you with, though the merchant books distinguish them. Fabrics weren't 'girly stuff' in those time, and the greatest volume of all traded commodities across borders apart, perhaps from slaves, were fabrics. Trade in fabrics, both inter-regional and international was the most phenomenal money-maker. Bigger than spices, and bigger than jewellery or food. And that importance is part of the reason that the precisely accurate depiction of fabrics was demanded by the patrons. In Cennini's book - meant for apprentices - he doesn't use the word sgraffiti when explaining how to render brocade and has to describe the sort of thing he means, but by the time of Vasari's handbook, Vasari doesn't bother describing it and assumes his reader knows what it is, and why it is done.
(iv) a fourth type of sgraffito was used to aid adherence of gold ink or gold-leaf to vellum or parchment . (If you want to find out more, the search term should be 'chrysography'.
It seems to me that whoever scratched the pigment in folios of the Vms either did so accidentally - as may well be the case - or they did so quite easily because they had been accustomed to scratching pigment - as a technique used in one of those four professions.
Sgraffito in Renaissance painting is one stage within a series of technical stages, so that it is embedded within a complex process that involved layers of gesso, egg binder, gold leaf and pigment. It isn't 'scribbling' and it was never casual or purposeless. Not as it appears in the Vms.
This is as long as a blogpost, so I'll cut it here. I don't think the Vms sgraffito is the work of an accomplished Latin EUropean artist; it could be the work of a scribe, but if so why should be employ a technique which had little purpose in Byzantine or Latin manuscript art apart from when writing in gold? I don't think anything in the manuscript justifies attributing the sgraffito to a builder's labourer. So that leaves us - temporarily anyway - with ceramics.
And here's the kicker -
ceramic artists were brought in to work on early Renaissance paintings.
A few of the easily accessible references
Jaroslav Folda, Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (also shows Sankai glaze).
Detail from folio 102r that may or may not be meant for Sankai glazed ware - The reference to Nick Pelling's post is because that's where I first saw the picture. Nothing to do with the written part of the post. :0
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
the link to Pelling's blog is because that post contains the illustration that told me we might be looking at Sankai glazed ware. If we come even as far west as Corinth, the date is most probably 13thC-earlier 14thC... which is exactly the period to which most of the early appraisers assigned Beinecke MS 408. So if it were Sankai (I reasoned back then), the chances were that we'd been looking too late, and too far west, for the informing sources. Nick's illustration proved very helpful in pointing me to the right time-frame for the current manuscript's near exemplars.
Well, that's the barest bones of the matter. Note how the definition of sgraffito shifts, depending on the professional environment. This definition is for high-art work using gold-leaf.
Can't say whether this is news to anyone else, but there is a second cloud band in the VMs rosettes. The original one is in the Central Rosette, just outside the circular band of text. The one more recently added to my investigations is found in the center rosette on the right hand side. Both examples were brought to the current discussion by D. Hoffmann.
Cloud bands are relevant to VMs investigation because of the cosmic comparison of Oresme's illustration (BNF Fr. 565 fol. 23) with VMs f68v, as proposed by E. Velinska.
If this comparison is sufficiently strong to show that there was an actual, structural connection between these two cosmic representations that exists despite their visual differences, because those visual differences were intentionally created, then there should be no problem connecting the cloud band of the central rosette with the VMs cosmos of f68v. Firstly. this is because the VMs clearly has other examples of cross-page connections and, secondly, because of the high degree of pattern similarity in the designs that compose both of these examples.
The Oresme cloud band is an excellent example of the scallop-shell patterned cloud band. Technically, it is built on an exaggerated nebuly line where the bulbous extremities have been depicted in a series of small arches, to give the characteristic scallop-shell shape. These running arches are similar to an engrailed line in heraldry.
The cloud band in the VMs Central Rosette is quite similar, with the difference that the engrailed characteristic runs throughout the entire nebuly line pattern, rather than only across the tops of the bulbs. This requires the engrailed line to be flipped when crossing the mid-line.
The cloud band in the VMs Right Center Rosette is even more elaborate. Like the Central Rosette, the engrailed line continues throughout. The interesting feature that I noted was that each bulb in this example contains a second line segment that follows the engrailed pattern. So I suggest that this pattern might be called 'double-topped'.
This double-topped construction has a hint of something familiar, but I can't pin it down. Unfortunately, many of the illustrations posted to the old 'wolkenband' thread seem to have gone to URLs
Does anyone have an illustration that shows a double-topped cloud band?
Not only does the second cloud band make it a pair of cloud bands side by side, but the Central Rosette contains a pair of Stolfi's markers. Both of which help advance the pairing paradigm.
[The pairing paradigm holds that, in some areas of the VMs research, the material that is relevant to finding the proper course of investigation will be found in pairs.]
I reread D'Imperio's The Voynich manuscript: an elegant enigma (Thanks to Rene Zandbergen for reminding). Now I have time to learn more concernicng the other theories about the Elixir of life. I've found in D'Imperio a short description of professor Brumbaugh's theory: "... the manuscript as a treatise on the «Elixir of Life «, designed to interest the Emperor Rudolph II by a forger who wished to make it appear to be the work of Roger Bacon. An ”encyclopedic sequence of drugs», possibly compiled from a variety of earlier manuscripts, is followed by astrological lore: the folios featuring nude female figures may deal. Brumbaugh thinks, with «the biology of reproduction, the theology of psychic reincarnation, or the topical application of the elixir». (1975. pp, 348-349). (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., M. E. D’Imperio, p. 22)
I want to adress to Rene and to all forum members who could help. Is it possible to find free-available articles about Brumbaugh's theory in details (in English or translatable with Google)? Of course, 70's was not the time when the internet, blogs and on-line libraries existed, but, maybe, somewhere his articles are saved. I've found only article in which he was criticized for his method of deciphering (May 6, 1975, The New York Times Archives, Page 41, the article You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and his paid book The Most Mysterious Manuscript: The Voynich "Roger Bacon" Cipher Manuscript. Brumbaugh's theory, as I understand, was quite much-talked-of in that time. I’d like to know the details as it pretty interests me, although I don't believe that the VMs is a hoax in any sense of this word.
I guess that one of the problems with statistical analyses of the VMS is that, when comparing with other sources, one typically only has modern texts available.
My impression is that some of the strange features of Voynichese might be caused by the script, rather than by the language.
For instance, there are medieval European scripts in which the same character is written differently on the basis of the nearby characters. I expect this could result in lower entropy (but it's clear to me that this phenomenon should be very extensive to result in second-order entropy comparable with the VMS).
This is an example of a script in which 'r' has three different shapes:
* similar to uppercase R (but smaller) at the beginning of words [red]
* similar to '2' or 'z' when midword and immediately following a "round" character ('o', 'p', 'd') [green]
* 'r' in other cases [blue]
Obviously, to an hypothetical transcriber having no knowledge of Latin languages and alphabet, these three would look like different characters and each would be transcribed as such. He would have to deal with a character that only occurs at the beginning of words and another one that only occurs in the presence of a restricted left context.
UPenn You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - Virgil - [Le livre des Eneydes] - France, late XV Century
Other interesting features in this manuscript are that 'v' only occurs word-initial (in all other cases, the same character as 'u' is used) and 's' has two different shapes (this is actually quite frequent), one only occurs at the end of words, the other elsewhere.
The example of 'v' is a simple case of ambiguity: a single symbol sometimes used for unrelated sounds. This same manuscript typically omits the dot upon 'i', with the result that 'm' and 'ni'/'in' are often indistinguishable. Of course, something similar might be happening with VMS EVA:i and EVA:e sequences (see also this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., by Stephen Bax).
I'll keep bouncing some "essentials" ideas off you guys
It might be handy to gradually build a list of common misconceptions or mistakes made by people studying the MS. This will allow us in the future to refer to that thread and say "you have fallen for misconceptions 6, 12 and 15". The advantage is that we don't really have to go looking for anything, the material will gradually come rolling in as we go along.
Ideally each misconception or commonly made mistake should be accompanied by a short explanation or a reference. We can divide them into different categories like imagery, text, statistics, linguistics, codicology... depending on what is collected.
If it takes off, I will link this thread to an essentials thread and collect them there.
An example of what I have in mind:
Imagery
Misconception #1: green water is somehow unusual Explanation: people often think that the green water in quire 13 needs a special explanation, like herbal baths. However, it was not unusual in medieval art for (salty) water to be colored green. Examples can be found on maps and De Balneis manuscripts.
And of course any misconceptions we include can be contested at all time.
I see that there is the thread [font=Alegreya, serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the voynich.ninja which discusses depiction of this page in the context of Winds, in particular, in the Ptolemaic system. I think that here, in the forum, must be a thread about the page f86v3 to collect all thought about its imagery in different conexts. [/font] [font=Alegreya, serif]This post includes observations on different myths containing scenes with birds and mountains, as well a part of my theory.[/font] During the study I was often surprised with that fact that many myths from different corners of the globe repeat the same stories, sometimes modified, but in the same time, include almost identical details and characters. The issue of my interest is not an exception: most part of myths about the Water of Life or the Water of Immortality includes episodes with a mountain or two mountains and birds, often – an eagle, a dove, a phoenix and a raven. I couldn’t ignore such a detail because of the same motive of the page f86v3 which contain two mountains (or a mountain and a volcano) at the bottom and certain watery or bubbling shapes (not mountains) ejecting likely fumes or mist. Birds always help to get the living water for gods and people:
an eagle and doves brought Ambrosia to Zeus helping him to win his father Cronus;
an eagle threw You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. plant to some mountain from heaven or brought it from the mountain to earth;
there are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about birds (eagles or doves, etc.) which brought the living water flying between two clashing rocks, as no man can do it.
As for the image of a bird (eagle, pelican, or phoenix) on a mountain in alchemy, it has no one exact meaning, since there are too many different details in alchemy which play important role in identification. For example, the white eagle means the White stone or Elixir, phoenix means achievement of successful final of the Great Work – rebirth as the Philosopher’s Stone. In general, birds in alchemy mean volatility, volatile state of the material. According to one alchemical author, «the eagle flies up to the clouds and receives the rays of the sun in his eyes.» The text of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.says that the first Hermes built the house at the mountain of the Moon opposite the Sun to observe the level of the Nile’s waters. They say, there was five Hermeses, obviously, this implies his five incarnations. Alchemical works sometimes mention one mountain (of adepts), it can be a one- or twin-peaked mountain, but often two mountains (Sol and Luna) are mentioned. The Voynich folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. contains two «mountains» and two birds, possibly, eagles, one of them is sitting on the peak of the rock, another is descending from above. Descending bird almost always means the Holy Spirit. I have an impression that the left mountain here is humid or watery, ejectin moisture in opposition to the right which is, rather, of earth and accepting humidity.
This post has been triggered by two recent comments by Diane. This first of these in a recent You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , but I did not want to disturb that discussion with something off-topic.
I would like to caution people against being misled by the following statement You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. :
Quote:It would also be the civil thing to do to run a google search and acknowledge the first person(s) to suggest similarities that you repeat in your paper. If only everyone did that it would save a lot of embarrassment and no-one could possibly suggest you'd just 'lifted it'.
Anyone writing in a blog post about their original thoughts and original work should not need to worry about this. Every blog poster knows very well what is their original work and what has been copied from elsewhere. The latter should be indicated.
It only becomes a problem if anyone says that he/she is the first to do or write a certain thing. This is almost impossible to prove, so one should be very careful in writing such things. I did not read the entire blog of "Searcher" so cannot say if this problem occurs.
If one posts original work, one should not expect to be accused of 'lifting' it. The fault lies with the person making the accusations.
Equally importantly, a "Google search" is inadequate for finding out about earlier work. This was also discussed briefly in Nick's blog, just a few days ago. As useful as it is for finding things, the result is not representative for the complete picture, and gives only a tiny fraction of relevant information.
To know the history of research in any topic, one has to do a thorough literature search. This is usually outside the possibilities of someone who is not already involved in this research, because one has to start from scratch, and most important resources are not to be found by a Google search, but only in libraries and archives. Or one has them already since one is more or less deeply involved.
For the Voynich MS there are many archives like the Beinecke, the Grolier Club, the Marshall library, and numerous other repositories of correspondence. None of these can be read through Google. Again, this is only a real problem if one wants to claim to be the first in something. Still, one misses a lot of interesting, and potentially useful information.
Therefore, the suggestion to use Google to find out about precedence is not a good one, for two reasons:
1 - you know yourself (and don't need to ask Google) what is your original work
2 - Google gives you a useless answer.
Fortunately, for the Voynich MS, these archives have already been searched by different people, and one can find bits and pieces of useful information in books like D'Imperio (1978) and Brumbaugh (1978). The first is even available on-line as a PDF, but not searchable, so again Google is no help.
All of this is true for blog posts, but a completely different regime applies for academic publications. Here, one cannot just write about a topic and not worry about what others have written. One has to demonstrate that one is familiar with the state of the art of this topic. This is especially important if one wants to present an alternative to what is 'best knowledge'. So, you don't only quote people who do the same thing, but also those you are intending to contradict, if these are important.
More often than not, demonstrating this knowledge is not an issue if the author is a known authority in the field, or, if it is a relative newcomer, by having such an authority as co-author.
The second post of the two I mentioned in the beginning demonstrates some of these points. It is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . I wasn't going to comment on it, but it fits in perfectly with this issue.
The statements:
Quote:Apart from some vague observations which were acute enough but undeveloped (such as a couple of John Tiltman's), there was no informed comment on this imagery between 1912 and 1931, when Anne Nill made a note of some offered by Panofsky. Once again there was no explanation in detail for those observations, though that doesn't lessen their importance as the first unforced, informed commentary we have.
Thereafter there appears to have been nothing recorded of any informed observation or comment on the imagery before 2008.
are plainly incorrect. (I put an effort to avoid terminology that would not be in line with forum policy).
However, this could be the impression one gets from relying on a Google search, and not bothering to look at literature, some of which is easily available.
I was going to post it here, but in the end it turned out to be a too big material, so I've finally decided to make a new blog and to place my whole theory concerning the VMs imagery there. Here is only the introduction and synopsis.
Due to my new observations on the Voynich MS, I can continue my «lunar» theory which was begun with observations on the hidden signs of the lunar cycle in the herbal part of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. You can find it You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I agree it looks unconvincing in the interpretation of quite obscure signs. Now it has grown from a separate observation into a more or less complete idea.
This idea is about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I don’t want to say it is new, but my aim is to represent how it can be explained entirely. Actually the matter is about the «living water» from the Moon. I think the whole conception of the VMs is the doctrine about influences of the Moon on the Earth water, plants and moistures of all bodies, about moisture and vapors of the Moon as the nature of its influence.
I don’t know whether my observations and conclusions will help in deciphering of the text or will more confuse, as, it seems, I haven’t found the answer to the question about the language in which the Voynich manuscript is written.
1. Analysis of patterns in the Voynich MS imagery.
2. Image of the Moon in the view of ancient and medieval people.
3. The Eagle and the Mountain.
4. The Water of the Moon: a divine liquid of immortality or the principle of reincarnation?
--Soma and Samsara.
--Ambrosia and metempsychosis.
--Manichean «Navis vitalium aquarum».
--Alchemical transformation: the White elixir as the way to the Redness.
--The Voynich pools of life-giving waters.
5. The place of the Voynich MS in the «Lunar» theory.
6. «Rosettes» – Ros – Ras – Aqua Vitae.
This is the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Please, use the direct link, Google Search doesn't work for it as I use free version Wordpress.
P. S. Koen, thanks for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It came just at the right moment.
Just on a whim I made the following image which shows the direction of the labels on the large foldout. The arrows always point to the top. So on a normal page (like this webpage) we would expect only upwards pointing arrows.
"Radial" labels, which are arranged as or along a circle, are marked in black.
Taking the orientation of the scan as the norm: GREEN arrows mark normal text. RED arrows mark upside down text. YELLOW arrows mark text which can be read when you turn the map 90° counter-clockwise BLUE arrows mark text which can be read when you turn the map 90° clockwise PINK arrows mark transitional directions.
What this diagram shows is that there appears to be a clockwise "flow" throughout the foldout which is followed rather consistently. I'm not sure what this means and I'm left with plenty of qiestions.
Does it show that the thing was meant to be rotated in one's hand?
Does it show the preferred orientation of specific parts?
Are there other documents which show this kind of behavior? (there are a few other pages in the VM)
![[Image: sgraffito-in-high-medieval-art.jpg]](https://voynichimagery.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/sgraffito-in-high-medieval-art.jpg)
![[Image: Ba%25C3%25B1o%2Bde%2BTritulus.jpg]](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Pu41qK_JKJg/WiPLa-Hg6OI/AAAAAAAACeM/wTByPFgc0B8tWJE7aey-fq9OCA54CHX1gCLcBGAs/s1600/Ba%25C3%25B1o%2Bde%2BTritulus.jpg)
