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Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - Printable Version

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RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - ReneZ - 06-07-2026

(06-07-2026, 09:41 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do we have a spreadsheet or graph where in the VM which color annotations are? Are they clustered in bifolios?

In a way... here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (under: overview of additional or extraneous writing)

RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - Bernd - 07-07-2026

Thanks, Rene!
I couldn't find a significant concentration of color annotations on VM bifolios or other similarities between annotated pages other than they are all Hand1 Alpha plants. Annotations are in
Q1 ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )
Q2 ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )
Q3 ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )
Q4 ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )

Pharma
Q19 ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )

The only bifolios with color annotations on several pages are f2-f7 and f28-f29

I still don't understand the color annotations in general. Why did the author feel the need to write such annotations? Because he felt the coloring was unintuitive in these cases? Or especially important? Is there a pattern in the annotations of the Gart der Gesundheit copies? We know those were not copied. They were not there in the original print.

RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - DG97EEB - 07-07-2026

Thanks Bernd. I did some digging on this with a deep research on Claude and GPT and then comparing them.

The standard treatment is J. J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (Yale University Press, 1992), chapter 3, "Programmes and Instructions for Illuminators", pp. 52-71, plus a census of related preliminary marginal drawings in his Appendix 2. Publisher page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ; searchable preview: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Short version: Written instructions to the artists are attested from Late Antiquity. The fifth-century Quedlinburg Itala already carries directions to its painters, partly hidden under the paint (Alexander pp. 4-5, fig. 1). The surviving evidence then increases from the thirteenth century, when production moved to lay professional workshops and the work was split between scribe, draughtsman and colourist. 

The functions Alexander documents: subject programmes telling the artist what to paint (the fullest is Jean Lebègue's written programme for a Sallust, Bodleian MS D'Orville 141); colour specifications; placement and layout fixes; checking and correction of finished work; and miniature counts tied to payment. These notes were working apparatus, expected to be erased or trimmed off at binding, so what survives skews toward unfinished books or, as in the Cgm 728 case, carelessly finished ones.

Examples by region:

France. The Bible moralisée (Paris, c. 1230, in volumes split between Oxford, Paris and London): a checker went through the finished roundels noting errors in French, including "Metez ihesu la robe blanche" (BL Harley 1526); the robe was painted purple anyway, so the correction was never made and the note never erased (Alexander p. 62). The Oxford volume is fully digitised: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . A thirteenth-century Paris Psalter, BnF lat. 108, preserves a marginal letter code, 'a' = azur, next to strokes possibly recording payment (Alexander p. 64 and p. 166 n. 62, citing P. Stirnemann, "Nouvelles pratiques en matière d'enluminure au temps de Philippe Auguste", 1982). I could not locate a digitisation of lat. 108, so that one rests on the printed citation. BnF fr. 823 (Deguileville, dated 1393) has "Remiet ne faites rien çy...", an instruction naming the artist (Alexander p. 166 n. 50).

England. Cambridge, St John's College MS 262 (K.21), folio 50v: an Anglo-Norman instruction above a miniature, "Comment Barrabas li leres fu livere hors de prison" (Alexander p. 166 n. 49).

Iberia. The Roda Bible, BnF lat. 6 (Catalonia, eleventh century): a Latin corrector's note in volume 3, folio 97, complaining that text and miniature are misplaced (Alexander p. 62). Volume 3 on Gallica: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Germany. The fullest instructional witness is the Göttinger Musterbuch (c. 1450, SUB Göttingen, 8° Cod. Ms. Uffenb. 51 Cim.), a painter's manual giving colour by colour directions ("Wie du alle varbe temperieren vnd riben sullent"). Digitised: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ; transcription and translation: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . The Cgm 728 and the Strasbourg BNU 2152 copy sit at the very tail of this tradition, into the print era.

Italy. Notably thin: Alexander's census records only a single Italian instance.

One caveat: Alexander is essentially silent on herbals. His examples cluster in Bibles, Psalters and Books of Hours, and his index of manuscripts contains none of the classic herbal witnesses (no Egerton 747, no Carrara Herbal, no Sloane 4016). So the comparative base for colour annotations in herbal-type books is thin in the published literature..

The process of annotate first, paint badly later is a centuries-old workflow, so the presence of colour annotations in the VM barely constrains its date on its own.

RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - Bernd - 07-07-2026

Thanks! I was afraid it's like that, somehow like the month names. Hard to nail down. But there are a bit too many coincidences between Cgm 728 and the VM for my taste. The color annotations are unlikely to have been invented independently, I'd rather say they originate from the same educational background. Which leaves us with 2 hypotheses:

A) Both the authors of the VM and Cgm 728 learned how to use color annotations from the same source, be it a book or an institution.
B) The VM author copied the color annotations from a source (maybe accidentally), and the artist of this source shared an educational background with the author of Cgm 728
In both cases, we have a slight timeline problem. Or - is the VM indeed younger than we think? Taccola as source already pushes the creation date post 1433.
So my question is - do we have German color annotations like the vertical 'rot' in younger herbals?

Another thing I cannot wrap my mind around is the whole point of these Schöffer print copies. Maybe I am missing something here, but why were they created?
There was a printed work of Gart der Natur. Surely, while cheaper than a manuscript, not everyone could afford it. But if we look at Cgm 728 - the author decided to copy the plants starting with letter A, and the plants starting with letter M. While skipping the rest. He copies the plants quite well and seemingly at random adds very few color annotations. Someone paints the plants basically dumping paint on the page, ruining the drawings. All in all a lot of work with questionable result. What was the entire point of painstakingly hand-copying parts of a printed book anyway? Why only the A and the M plants?

In contrast, Strasbourg ms. 2152 is a complete copy of Schöffer's print, but the painter effectively destroyed the manuscript as the paint soaked the paper and made it brittle, so many drawings are now holes. I mean, why for heaven's sake? At least after the 1st attempt one should realize that you can't do it like this. But the painter mercilessly massacred his way through the entire manuscript. It all seems so absurd...

RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - MarcoP - 08-07-2026

(Yesterday, 07:06 AM)DG97EEB Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Italy. Notably thin: Alexander's census records only a single Italian instance.

One caveat: Alexander is essentially silent on herbals.

I guess everybody is aware of at least some of these, but we discussed color annotations in a few herbals in the past. In the first two cases, everything points to Italy and Italian, the other three are more complex:
  • You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (made in Tuscany). Here there are cases in which the annotations were not followed (marked “rossa” but painted green).
  • You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - another copy of the Alchemical Herbal (a few decades later than the the VMS).
  • Rene pointed out the interesting You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., whose “rot” was a major breakthrough later quoted by Alain Touwaide.  The color annotations are in German, though the main text is Latin and Italian, so Segre-Rutz believes that the part with the annotations (the Alchemical Herbal) was written in a German-speaking area.
  • Koen pointed out a Latin color annotation in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It is not clear if this ms was made in Southern Italy or is a German-made copy of a Southern-Italian original.
  • You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. contains some color annotations that I couldn’t read. The main text is Italian, but I now wonder if “uon” could be the German “von”?

These are the occurrences that come to mind right now. It's likely I am forgetting other examples...

RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - DG97EEB - 08-07-2026

Thanks Marco, and indeed my comment was limited to Alexander's work only. This is a superbly helpful addition..

RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - Koen G - 08-07-2026

An important nuance to keep in mind is that we are not supposed to see color annotations. So by their very nature, they will only appear in a fraction of manuscripts where they were actually used. If writing them in the margin to be cut off was the norm, we wouldn't even know they were ever there. So we only see them when a MS is unfinished or finished somewhat carelessly.

RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - MarcoP - 08-07-2026

I don’t think I understand how the trimming could have worked: a manuscript without margins looks rather bad in general.

Some of the cases we are discussing (e.g. the Vicenza herbal) had annotations next to the part to be painted, in these cases they wouldn’t be covered by paint and they couldn’t be cut-off. Maybe the annotations were supposed to be scraped-off; or maybe it was acceptable that some of them remained visible in an average-quality manuscript.

EDIT: but I agree that it's reasonable to assume that many annotations were covered with paint and maybe trimmed, or scraped off, so the evidence we can see doesn't fully represent how common they were.

RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - DG97EEB - 08-07-2026

If helpful to anyone, this is the full Alexander text which I share here for scientific value only and am happy to take down if anyone has any copyright concerns You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

RE: Voynich style herbs+text wrapping: BSB Cgm 728 - Bernd - 08-07-2026

Much appreciated!
Would it even be possible to scrape ink off medieval paper? It would have soaked deep. I don't think such annotations were a concern in low quality reproduction like those Gart der Natur copies. But again - what was the point at all? What the illustrations share with the VM is the curious fact that they are large but ugly drawings with unclear function. Drawings in herbals were - as we know - mostly ornamental. The Cgm 728 and Strasbourg 2152 illustrations aren't too bad (at least better than most VM plants), but in Cgm728 most plants were skipped, and in the Strasbourg manuscript the paintjob utterly ruined them to the point of being an eyesore. You can't discern much either anymore.

   

So why? This was a lot of work, but for what purpose? What do you do with such a manuscript? It looks more like an exercise from an unwilling student than a practical work. And certainly not aesthetically pleasing like the original print. There must have been some rationale behind it, and chances are not bad that a similar rationale was behind the VM.