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+--- Thread: green water (/thread-184.html)
RE: green water - don of tallahassee - 22-02-2016
iiiii
RE: green water - VViews - 22-02-2016
(22-02-2016, 12:56 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have to say that your opinion about green water not being useful in provenancing and dating imagery runs contrary to the usual opinion, which is that to represent sea-water as green was rare in Europe before the manuscript tradition was influenced by models gained from outside the Latin environment, whether Jewish or Islamic.
Hello Diane,
This post is about water, not specifically sea water.
My post above was hastily assembled and I had not realized at the time that all these images happened to depict sea water: I should have spent more time on the post to show more variety, but this was remedied by ReneZ's post. So in the end, sea or freshwater, green is common in many times and places. That is what the evidence says.
I really doubt that what we see in the Voynich "balneo" is sea water anyway, but hey why not.
Don of Talahassee wisely reminded us to back up what we say with evidence: it would be great if you could do the same (link to images, scholarly article, mainstream reference book...) for what you call "the usual opinion", etc.
Ultimately, for our purposes, it doesn't really matter where the idea of painting water green originated if evidence shows that such practice was widespread and common by the 12th Century, a full three centuries before the earliest date the Voynich was made. As I said the consequence is that this particular aspect doesn't help w/date or place. Other aspects of Voynich iconography are much more helpful.
RE: green water - VViews - 22-02-2016
If anyone is interested or just bored, here's a really great radio show about the perception/description/classification of colors across time and cultures and how it can differ from our present day one.
It really addresses the points made by juergenw and david very well.
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RE: green water - -JKP- - 23-02-2016
School psychologist was examining some drawings by a little girl. The hands and faces were all green. Other colors (blue, red, orange) were natural, but not the faces.
Psychologist talks to the teacher, asks if there have been any behavioral problems, etc. Teacher mentions maybe some problems at home.
Psychologist talks to the little girl, asks her to explain the pictures. Doesn't get much information and finally comes out and asks why the faces are green.
Little girl responds, "The pink crayon ran out." This is based on a true story.
Sometimes color choices have nothing to do with tradition or the color of the object. Sometimes they are based on available pigments or the cost of those pigments. Cochineal (red), for example, was very costly in most areas (it's made from tiny insects) and only available to the wealthy or those close to trading depots for those items.
And then there is color blindness... red/green color blindness is very common (particularly in men, since it's a genetically sex-linked trait) but blue/green color blindness, especially in the turquoise (blue-green) range, is not uncommon either and also affects women.
I think the VMS illustrator knew blue from green, since aqua-blue was used in the buckets next to the green water and some details of the plants show attention to color detail, but depending on access to minerals/plants or to a pigment supplier, some color choices may be based on pigment availability, cost, and color perception.
RE: green water - VViews - 23-02-2016
-JKP-,
Great anecdote, and I for one completely agree that the possibilities you mention, particularly the pigment availability argument, cannot be ruled out at this point.
I think it was ReneZ (?) who once voiced the wish that we could somehow digitally remove the paint layers from the Voynich to see what it would look like without all the potentially misleading colors, and also to get a clearer view of all the underlying details.
I hope one day such a thing becomes available!
RE: green water - ReneZ - 23-02-2016
Actually I was once contacted by someone who had done a reasonably good job at this.
But he was looking to publish and sell them......
Back on the colours in the bio section:
There is some blue water in most of the pages, epecially smaller patches.
Here are entire pools in blue, but they are smaller than most:
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It is just possible that he wanted to 'save' his blue paint.
There is some blue 'contamination' in several of the pools, which look almost like
offprints of other pages, but these are not the reverse or the opposite ones.
For example:
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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (both pools)
However, this could also be intentional.
Finally, a suggestion of a process with blue water at the top, turning green in the middle and blue again at the bottom:
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RE: green water - juergenw - 24-02-2016
(23-02-2016, 02:22 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
There is some blue 'contamination' in several of the pools, which look almost like
offprints of other pages, but these are not the reverse or the opposite ones.
For example:
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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (both pools)
However, this could also be intentional.
...
the blue in the one with both pools (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) looks actually like the 'original' water level and the green was used to fill the 'space' throughout: The top pool has a level blue line-ish that is level with the exit at the left, where the blue water runs through the pipe down to the bottom pool and drips/slowly fills the bottom 'pool' (again looks like filled with green in its entirety afterwards later?).
Imagining it without the green colour it would look/seem 'logical' to me, too
RE: green water - Diane - 25-02-2016
Rene,
These examples have been cited many times, and the difficulty with their being used to justify theories about what the Vms images are about is that the comparisons are limited to "looks-like" in an entirely personal apprehension.
One could just as well say that the use of interlace on a piece of Icelandic ivory carving "looks like" a piece of interlace ornamenting a Coptic manuscript. It is possible that some historical link is responsible for that perceived likeness, but one has to provide a bit more in the way of historical and comparative material to assert any particular connection.
There is so much about the corpus of imagery in copies of the Balneis Puteolanis which tells us that while the text is innocuous, and was composed in Europe, its copying was an excuse to circulate imagery which might be considered, in modern terms, salacious.
It appears to be a deliberate subversion of imagery obtained either from works by European Jews, or from the near east - possibly from Antioch. When one compares the style of drawing (that is, drawing as such) with, for example, copies of some Haggadah, the difference in attitudes becomes clear although the forms are often similar. That is to say, that comparable imagery in the Haggadah is not in the least salacious, where some of the imagery in Copies of the Balneis Puteolanis (a title which one might consider a deliberate double entendre) is plainly and unmistakeably medieval pronography. I see nothing of a similar character in MS Beinecke 408, and should argue strongly that a common use of green for water is insufficient argument against their having very different intent and widely different origins.
IMO
RE: green water - -JKP- - 25-02-2016
(22-02-2016, 05:18 PM)don of tallahassee Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I guess everyone knows more about this than I do (not surprising to me). Thank you to all of y'all.
Maybe this line of investigation is one of the ones that turns up no evidence to speak of that will help us with the VMS. The chaperones (baggy stocking hats) that I researched show the same pattern of use - from all over Europe, and from the early days onward, chaperone-like-hats could be found in manuscript images. (I have a whole file of the hat images, if anyone would like to use them - and there is a much better site on the internet - I'll see if I can find the link. Let me know.)...
I compared the color palette to about 60 other manuscripts with similar content (from all over) and the one it most closely matched, of those I've seen so far, was Das Buch der Nature:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (pics are about halfway down)
RE: green water - Koen G - 30-03-2016
I happened to read this article just now You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It reminded me of the Voynich waters so I looked for this thread. I'm glad to see juergen already mentioned the important part: many ancient cultures did not distinguish between blue and green. While we see these colours as totally different, they did not.
What this means is that at least we shouldn't find it too absurd that green is used for water- they saw it as shades of the same color. As Diane says, specific shades were matched with certian types of water. The Ancients even tended to describe a particular sea as leek-green, assigning different shades to others. That doesn't mean they thought those waters were strang or dirty. Green was just within the accepted range of colors to describe and depict waters.