Posted by: Koen G - 24-07-2018, 08:42 AM - Forum: Imagery
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I came across a 14th century You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of Noah in the vineyard from the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in Kosovo. The frescoes are called a fine example of Byzantine renaissance style.
The way the stem of the plant is drawn reminds me of the style of a herbal manuscript we discussed a while back, but I'm unable to remember which one at the moment.
Anyway, that's not the point. What drew my attention was the way the grapes are drawn. In the thumbnail it looked like Noah was handling strange, otherworldly "pods" filled with some kind of bubbles.
It appears like the fresco uses an unusual form of shading, dividing the grape bunches in half and coloring only one side. Based on this evidence, I would suggest the possibility that the VM in fact uses precisely the same style of "shading", but because of the atrocious quality of the paint job we are unable to recognize it as such.
Hi everyone,
I just can't find a good parallel for the "nebuly" pattern on the outer circle of f70r1. I figured I'd start a thread here to see if anyone has any such examples.
It's not really a cloudband/nebuly/wolkenband. It is like a regular circle with nine double scalloped protrusions.
Even if I ignore the nine, I can't find examples of lines that do this, alternating between flat and scalloped, let alone double scallops.
I think these patterns are unusual enough that identifying a match might give very interesting information about culture and background of the illustrator.
Here's the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. figure as a whole:
And the pattern with blue paint removed, not just because I'm a Voynich colors revisionist, but mostly to make the pattern stand out better:
I'd be really interested in any parallels others may have found for this pattern, obviously even more so if it's in a roundel!
Any ideas?
The quick answer is: I don't know, but Koen correctly pointed out:
Quote:
Quote:I have a theory about who sold the MS to Rudolf.
Hey, as the Dutch saying goes, "who says A, must say B"
I mentioned a name in my 2012 presentation in Villa Mondragone. This is the Augsburg physician, paracelsan and manuscript collector Karl Widemann.
His name is also spelled in different ways.
He is still my best candidate, but the more interesting question is: what is the likelihood that he is indeed the man.
And this is where it gets difficult.
What is certainly true is that in 1599 Rudolf asked a commission from one of his main financial advisers You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. (He did that quite frequently).
In this case it was to acquire a set of books from Karl Widemann, for 500 Taler. Geizkofler was supported somehow by Matthias Peugl, and one or the other described the books as 'selzam', which I tentatively translate as 'unusual'.
The books were sent to Hans Popp, one of Rudolf's 'Kammerdiener' in Prague.
On a side note, around 1586-1587 Widemann was in Prague working for Rudolf and in Trebon working for Vilem Rosenberg. He also knew, or even worked together with Edward Kelly.
The "theory" part of this is that these books are the Voynich MS, still in several parts, or the MS was one of them.
At least one book that Widemann sold to Rudolf (then or at some other time) has been preserved and is now in Leiden: Voss.Chym. Q56 , and that can hardly be qualified as 'unusual'.
Anyway, several sources are still to be followed up, and it isn't going very fast
I thought it would be useful to have a conversion table here between the sequential images numbers on the Beinecke website
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and the usual folio numbers. Maybe on the folio browser too. Looking at the combo box now, it seems some numbers are off. (?)
This is something I discussed many, many years ago. Nobody came up with a conclusive answer. So here it is again : is this a humanoid face in the bottom right of the rosettes?
How likely is it that we will be able to learn more about the author of the Voynich Manuscript?
On the assumption that, once we can read the Voynich Manuscript, the following are true:
1) we identify a named author;
2) he was European;
3) lived some time between 1400 and 1450;
4) had at least a moderate education and income; and
5) is not otherwise known to history.
I know that for England (for example; I do not believe the author was English) there are likely to be other documents of the period which identify clerks by name, either contracts, legal documents, accounts, and so on. But what if the author was Italian, German, Polish, Czech, or other? Will we be left with a name only or is there likely more that we can discover?
The following is from an email I wrote back in 2015:
Quote: I'm starting to realise that any eventual "solution" of this book is likely to be philosophical, not analytical.
I've argued in the past that the transcriptions are worthless for the sort of mathematical decryption being looked at by the uninformed net. But without them, we're lost, so it's a catch 22 problem. What comes out is only as good as what went in....
The basic problem, as I see it, is that we are too analytical. We are used to reading that everything can be broken down to quantifiable molecules and processed via mathematical models to produce an answer.
The Voynich is becoming the exception that proves that rule!
But it's not an alien object - we do have access to the mentality of the era that produced it. We just have to "unlearn" our modern preconceptions.
There are clues in the imagery that show a certain mentality, but they're not obvious until you start learning about late medieval / early Renaissance mentality and knowledge. Hence the constant "wild theories" when people try to project their own preconceptions onto the book.
Notwithstanding that, a re-examination of the core concepts, bearing in mind the historic epistemology, is, I hope, capable of producing some interesting new nuggets of information.
It strikes me that it's as true as ever.and in fact the last few 'theories' are doing this They're abandoning the analytical to try to translate what 'feels right'.
So, how do we strike a middle path and translate this document?
If we assume this is a late middle ages Latin document with lots of shorthand, what's the next step?
This is something Wladimir D brought up on the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. letter-forms similar to the marginalia, so I thought I would post an illustration of the discrepancy between most of the "a" characters and the last "a" in oladaba8, which he rightly notes is shaped differently from the others.
It might just be pen variation or a slip of the hand, but because the oddball "a" is similar to the main text "a" (which has a more slanted stem), it might be worth noting it here:
Since there seems to be a Voynichese "i" in Vix and two Voynichese tokens bottom left, is it possible this character is a Voynichese "a" and perhaps is meant to be pronounced differently (or understood differently in some other way)? Or had the writer been writing Voynichese and gotten used to writing the letters differently and slipped and wrote it that way unconsciously?
I only just recently found a 2016 post by JKP that compared the heads and noses of the two Aries, coming to the conclusion that they were drawn by different people, with clearly different levels of skill.
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I can't post images in the comments over there, so I figured I'd bring the discussion here.
I just wanted to add that the same can be observed about Taurus: the while Dark Taurus' head is pretty confidently drawn, the light Taurus is... rather unfortunate looking.
Like the two Aries, they have very different noses and eyes. Light Taurus has the same weird head tilt as Leo.
This makes me want to agree with JKP's observation that there are two artists at work here. I like JKP's idea that there was some sort of elder being called in for assistance.
In both cases, it is the first animal that has a poorly drawn head, and the second one looks a lot better. Maybe the "senior" artist saw what had been done in the first Aries and Taurus, and seeing how awful they were, stepped in to finish the second ones?
As JKP notes, the timeline for the process is hard to guess.
I'm not sure whether these remarks can be taken much further, or if anything else might suggest two artists at work for the other Zodiac roundels too.
Anyway, although I'm late to comment on this, I thought it should be given some space for discussion on the forum.
![[Image: capture-d_c3a9cran-984.png]](https://voynichviews.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/capture-d_c3a9cran-984.png)
![[Image: f70r1nopaint.png]](https://voynichviews.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/f70r1nopaint.png)
![[Image: image.jpg?q=f86_ins_ros-1316-1168-291-266]](https://voynich.ninja/extractor/image.jpg?q=f86_ins_ros-1316-1168-291-266)
![[Image: MarginaliaVariableA.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/MarginaliaVariableA.png)