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+--- Thread: flat-top / hollow roots (/thread-1600.html)
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RE: flat-top / hollow roots - Wladimir D - 12-03-2017
I do not know if anyone previously explained why the plant You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has two tiers of roots.
My explanation is as follows.
Note that five plants have a head (thickening at the bottom of the stem), and four plants have no such thickening.
The artist tried to depict Curtin (bush), if to look at it just below the horizon. In this case, can not be seen "thickening" of plants that are in the background (red arrow), and vice versa, in these plants the roots fall into the field of vision, which forms in the picture the lower tier of the roots (dark green arrow).
RE: flat-top / hollow roots - ReneZ - 13-03-2017
Since Marco pointed out the similarity between Wellcome MS 336 and Paris BN Italian 1108, I decided to have a look at the asparagus there too:
Edit/ addition:
the Modena herbal Estense alfa.L.9.28 (also known as Lat.993) is full of examples of herbs drawn on a piece of ground.
In general, all trees are shown this way, but also many plants, and it uses several different ways of doing this.
See You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
RE: flat-top / hollow roots - Diane - 13-03-2017
By pure coincidence, on Thursday I happened to add a publication to the ninja library that illustrates an asparagus plant.
( I'd greatly appreciate members remembering to add the date of any manuscript they propose as comparison for imagery in the Vms.)
I'm not sure I understand just what point is being argued in this thread. Is it that pictures with a flat or nearly-flat surface above the roots are to be interpreted as pictures of the asparagus plant?
Or is it that pictures showing thick roots and a more-or-less flat surface are asparagus, or that those with a perfectly flat surface and any sort of tangled roots are asparagus?
Which of these are being asserted comparisons for those Latin manuscripts?
On 6v - dense, tangled-looking roots.
On f.36r - thick tangled-looking roots, this time with a level bole.
on f. 39r - not just level surface but a surface actually shown shadowed - so one intended to be read as being as smooth as a mirror or as shallow water.
f. 43r - a double layer of tangled roots, interweaving, above which a series of plants having 'harlequin'-effect foliage
f. 46r. - filament-like roots and soil shown again a bit hairy looking.
Since none show a spear of asparagus, which are and aren't supposed to be "like" asparagus, and why?
What I would really like explained - since now almost four generations later, people are still trying to provide evidence post-hoc for the idea - is why in the absence of any solid preliminary study and assessment, it was ever asserted that the botanical folios are related to the Latin herbal genre?.
Ninety years and we still lack any informed and well-researched historical study which offers reasonable argument and evidence for the view that the persons who made the botanical folios: their first enunciation and final version in our manuscript *intended* to create a series of medicinal plant portraits, much less that those persons had interest in no plants save those of the standard Latin European herbal tradition.
Ninety years and we're still relying on inferences being drawn by readers faced with two images in entirely different style, and which are only similar in one small detail, and even then... not so much.
But I have a copy of Alain Touwaide's original essay for Mondragone on the way. Perhaps that will change my mind.
RE: flat-top / hollow roots - MarcoP - 27-03-2017
In this illustration from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. a tree is simplified in a way similar to that of many Voynich roots.
The caption says: Illustration from a work by Mariano di Jacopo Vanni, known as Taccola (15th Century), manuscript, 17th Century.
The manuscript seems XV Century to me, for what is worth.
According to Wikipedia, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. died in 1453 ca.
RE: flat-top / hollow roots - MarcoP - 02-04-2017
Plant #53 Herba Zinziana (gentiana lutea, according to Segre Rutz) in the so-called You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. tradition has been represented both with a “hollow root” and a “flat-top root”.
Bodley Canon Misc. 408 is the most ancient exemplar or this tradition (1378). The root is vaguely of the “flat-top” kind, but it seems to me to be more nature-like than the Voynich flat-tops.
BNF Lat. 17848 dates to the second half of the XV Century. Here the root has become clearly “hollow”.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is dated 1550-1605 according to the Bologna University site. Aldrovandi's image is an excellent flat-top root, but unluckily we don't know if the cylindrical simplification was copied from an earlier source or independently introduced in this XVI Century copy.
RE: flat-top / hollow roots - -JKP- - 02-04-2017
I would agree that this is Gentiana lutea, the variations on the name pretty much confirm it (plus one of the modern names is genciana). Also, the drawing looks like G. lutea.
I'm not surprised they drew the root like that. G. lutea has a broad top and finger-like branches. It's similar to a mandrake or branching parsnip root, thick at the top with "fingers" lower down.
It's my belief (as I mentioned up-thread) that a flat-top (especially if there are multiple plants) represents a plant that sets out rhizomes and grows thickly from new shoots and that it may also refer to aquatic plants, sometimes, which often grow in this manner (sending out rhizomes and forming thick clumps)...
But... I think some of the herbal drawings represent "boles" in the sense of being thick, fibrous roots and lower stems. So... one finds them on drawings of woody shrubs, or plants with a tough lower stem.
Even though it's stylized, the root does resemble a G. lutea root and G. lutea does put out rhizomes (sideways roots that spread to create new plants), so even this aspect of the flat-top root would be botanically supported.
RE: flat-top / hollow roots - MarcoP - 11-04-2017
Bertoliana ms 362, Vicenza, is well known to Voynich researchers for the German color annotations that look similar to annotations in the VMS. This parallel has been discussed by Rene Zandbergen and, more recently, Alain Touwaide.
![[Image: 163926.jpg]](https://stephenbax.net/wp-content/comment-image/163926.jpg)
The XV Century Vicenza ms contains one of the earliest copies of the Alchemical Herbal, still in Latin (not the later Italian translation). I found in "Di Sana Pianta" (the catalog of a 1988 exhibition) the illustration of Zinciana / Gentiana. This image seems to me somehow intermediate between Canon.Misc.408 and the Aldrovandi ms: the top is clearly flat, but the root is more detailed than in Aldrovandi's copy. Also in this case, there are German color annotations ("grun" for green and "gel" for yellow).
RE: flat-top / hollow roots - MarcoP - 12-04-2017
A "hollow root" from Venezia, Marciana It.Z.78 = ms 4758, Veneto, late XV Century. This ms is believed to be from the same workshop as the Trento Herbal ms 1591.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (pg.118) there is an Italian paper with some additional information and illustrations.
RE: flat-top / hollow roots - Diane - 19-02-2018
Re-reading this thread, I want to offer additional information for readers and sincere thanks to Rene Zandbergen for bringing this manuscript to notice once more, and in this context.
Quote:Modena herbal Estense alfa.L.9.28 (also known as Lat.993)
(I will have to check to see who first noticed similarities between that ms and the Vms; for those who like details to be in order, my only previous public reference to it is a clip, unlabelled, in 'Paradoxical History of Balsam #5 (final)' (Sun., May 5th, 2013).
Anyway -
The website for the whole manuscript is
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where this manuscript is
Item 122.
Quote:ALFA.L.9.28 = LAT.993
Tractatus de herbis
Ms., 15. sec.
The whole manuscript can be downloaded as a PDF - I hope that information is helpful for Rene and others.
The PDF shows the manuscript is too late to have influenced the Vms, but the opposite may well be true.
Quote:The PDF gives the manuscript's date as 1458.
As those who read my research well know, I consider the source for the botanical imagery to have been persons actively and personally involved in the eastern trade in vegetable products ... in the east.
I have also sketched my reasons for thinking the same profession and those who used the imported plants before the Norman period in Sicily are responsible for the sudden appearance of certain texts there.
That as it may be, on folio 36v (pdf 37/340) we see a fine image of a cinnamon merchant, and non-European plants and produce throughout this later, Latin, manuscript.
I would recommend everyone interested in the botanical section - regardless of where they stand theory-wise - downloads that manuscript.
It is publicly available and (in my not-unqualified opinion) an important evidence for subsequent influence in Latin manuscripts of the eastern customs in art earlier and more authentically represented by the Vms - or rather its fourteenth-century precedents.
RE: flat-top / hollow roots - byatan - 26-07-2021
Could the plants with the discontinuous root / stem transition and the ones with the nice transition simply be a stylistic difference, having been drawn by separate artists?