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+--- Thread: [split] Color annotations? (/thread-2364.html)
RE: f29r - -JKP- - 07-04-2018
(07-04-2018, 06:39 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes, it does look like the 'p' is some Latin manuscripts. And like the letter tsade and others again. Presuming it must be German has led to a lot of prematurely applied limits to investigation, imo.
I have never presumed the language to be German. It's just one of many possibilities and not at the top of my list of options.
Also, I am very familiar with Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Aramaic, Georgian, Amharik, Korean, and other alphabets (I can even read a little bit of Chinese and Japanese and can puzzle out a fair number of words in abbreviated Greek if it's not too technical and can also read simple words in Georgian and Amharic) and it does not look like a typical medieval tsade to me. Tsade/Tsadi does not have a long leading serif and when there is a serif on the old cursive scripts, it's usually on the tail and points left. Also, the right-stem on tsade in the old texts tends to be straighter than the shape in the plant.
![[Image: Tsade.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Tsade.png)
Even in Aramaic, it doesn't look like tsade, as it usually was written with the gap on the bottom, not the top. If it looked like tsade, I would not have thought of it as a "p" and I would have included examples of tsade. I am more interested in foreign alphabets than I am in Latin.
RE: f29r - VViews - 08-04-2018
(07-04-2018, 03:27 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would anyone really spontaneously classify the color of this root as red or even reddish? I could understand brown, yellow, gold or light beige. That gives plenty of possible color terms to try, but red seems like a stretch.
IIRC there was some consensus here that these letters in the plants are likely to be color annotations.
The fact that this one, like several others, does not correspond to the actual color used reinforces my opinion that the colors were added by someone who had little if any understanding of the manuscript's text nor a very in-depth understanding of paint preparation or illumination practices, and possibly also poor/undeveloped/declining fine motor skills.
29v is a great example of the contrasting levels of skill between the person who drew the plant and the person who added the colors.
The plant itself is actually drawn with attention to detail. However the rendering of the details of the leaves' texture is almost totally ruined by the awfully sloppy paint job.
In the flower part up top, the painter just manages to stay within the lines of simple large red dots. In the roots and stalk, the yellow is uneven and streaky.
So IMO, the fact that the paint color doesn't correspond to the "r" annotation is not a problem: it just adds weight to the scenario I describe above.
As I've stated before, in analyzing the Voynich I strongly believe we are better off just ignoring the paint colors completely.
RE: f29r - Koen G - 08-04-2018
In that case I'd rather see the annotations as "corrections" that happened after the painting. Like "this yellow should actually be red".
Also, as JKP blogged about once, there seem to be at least two main painters throughout the manuscript (that is proper painters, ignoring the heavy paint applied afterwards). One of them actually does a very decent job. This again complicates things. Though there is the possibility that the annotations are from one painter to the other.
OR the annotations are spots the heavy painter missed
RE: f29r - Anton - 08-04-2018
Both these points lack evidence.
The fact that some annotations (but not all) do not match actual colours would most probably mean the lack of certain paint (as I already note above in the thread)
The "sloppiness" could be explained by the relatively small size of the paintings combined with possible lack of fine brush.
RE: f29r - MarcoP - 08-04-2018
(08-04-2018, 01:42 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.IIRC there was some consensus here that these letters in the plants are likely to be color annotations.
The fact that this one, like several others, does not correspond to the actual color used reinforces my opinion that the colors were added by someone who had little if any understanding of the manuscript's text nor a very in-depth understanding of paint preparation or illumination practices, and possibly also poor/undeveloped/declining fine motor skills.
29v is a great example of the contrasting levels of skill between the person who drew the plant and the person who added the colors.
The plant itself is actually drawn with attention to detail. However the rendering of the details of the leaves' texture is almost totally ruined by the awfully sloppy paint job.
In the flower part up top, the painter just manages to stay within the lines of simple large red dots. In the roots and stalk, the yellow is uneven and streaky.
So IMO, the fact that the paint color doesn't correspond to the "r" annotation is not a problem: it just adds weight to the scenario I describe above.
As I've stated before, in analyzing the Voynich I strongly believe we are better off just ignoring the paint colors completely.
Hi VViews,
I totally agree. That these are colour annotations is perfectly consistent with the available evidence. This has also been confirmed by an authority like Touwaide in his 2016 paper:
Alain Touwaide (translation mine) Wrote:Voynich ms illustrations contain instructions about the colors to be applied to pen drawings, according to the different parts of plants. Such instructions mention the name of the color to be applied (Voynich f4r), but in German, a peculiar fact that does not seem to be compatible with a Northern Italian origin of the manuscript.
As someone else (Emma?) recently wrote, carbon dating the ms has not stopped the flourishing of American theories. So I am afraid that expecting consensus on anything is not realistic.
I copy and paste some more from threads you have already read (in particular, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
Colour annotations are also sometimes ignored in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This is even clearer now that we also know You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (a more accurate copy of the same original).
For instance, the blossoms (?) in Imorio are labeled "rossa" (red) but were turned into green leaves in the Vermont herbal.
The stems in Tora (one of the plants from the Alchemical Herbal) are also labelled "rosso". They were painted correctly in the Udine ms, but they are green in the Vermont copy.
In the VMS, the leaves in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are painted green and yellow. Two of them are labelled 'g' and 'j': it seems that at least sometimes the colour annotations have been followed.
An open "p" similar to the one discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. appears in an annotation in Vicenza Bertoliana ms 362 (the Italian ms with German annotations originally pointed out by Rene).
RE: [split] Color annotations? - Koen G - 08-04-2018
Thread split, it seems better to have a dedicated one about color annotations.
Again though, I'd like to note that the painting in the VM varies in quality and some pages are actually decent. For example, looking at the samples Marco posted above, I wouldn't say that the VM paint job is much worse than the others. Other VM pages are definitely worse, on the other hand.
RE: [split] Color annotations? - VViews - 08-04-2018
MarcoP,
thank you for the interesting comparisons.
The more such examples are presented, the more we may see that some of the "peculiarities" of the Voynich may well turn out to actually be quite common, and hopefully even characteristics of certain local practices.
For me, one of the most intriguing questions regarding color annotations in the Voynich is this:
We can find color annotations in the "herbal" or "big plants" section of the Voynich, but in none of the others. Why is this?
I remember from one of the papers cited in the thread you reference that one of the main purposes of color annotations was to indicate places where alternating colors were to be applied.
This is the type of use that we see in the leaves of your example of f1v.
But:
Outside of the big plant section, there are several sections with illustrations which feature alternating colors (for example: 67r1, or 69r, or the 9-rosette foldout, or the red/yellow stars in Q20, among others) yet these do not feature any color annotations.
Why the inconsistency?
Could this indicate that the choice of colors applied to those non-annotated illustrations didn't matter, and so the scribe left the painter free to add whatever colors he wanted?
Or could this be a clue that the Voynich could be a copy of several distinct works: an herbal which contained color annotations, and other works which did not?
Or...???
(Sorry if I'm going off on a speculation tangent! The simultaneous presence and absence of color annotations in different parts of the Voynich is something that really intrigues me. )
RE: [split] Color annotations? - Hubert Dale - 09-04-2018
Hi all,
The letters on f20r and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. were both listed by Reuben Ogburn back in 2004. His site now seems to have disappeared but you can still find it on the Wayback Machine:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
and, for what it's worth, I agree that they represent 'p' and 'r' respectively.
I don't think that every individual letter or short group one sees in and around the Voynich illustrations is necessarily a colour indication, and it's fairly obvious that they weren't all written by the same writing instrument (and probably at different times too). But Marco's post above shows that there is one group of abbreviations in the VMS which really does look an awful lot like German examples seen elsewhere, both in terms of what is written and where they are placed.
I keep hoping that these colour indications might somehow give confirmation of meaningful content in the VMS. If they were actually added by the scribe who produced the VMS, this would be pretty conclusive evidence that it 'mattered' that a plant's leaves or root were a particular colour. But, sadly, I don't think we can be sufficiently confident that the colour annotations are of a piece with the manuscript's creation - and in fact I'm pretty sure that some cannot be.
My suspicion is that the manuscript may have been created circa 1430, and quickly came into the possession of someone who didn't understand the text and didn't really understand the illustrations either, and it was at this point that the confused and confusing process of its illumination - including colour indicators - began. I'm not familiar with the current state of our understanding of this process, but I do know that the suggestion of multiple colourists and retouchers goes back to Stolfi. German colour indicators added in 1450 might not have been understood by (say) an Italian painter working a century later?
Can anyone say whether the plants which have the colour indicators are those for which it's easy to come up with identifications? Might someone in the fifteenth century have come across the unilluminated VMS, scratched their head, and gone to another illustrated herbal and matched plants and colours as best they could?
RE: [split] Color annotations? - MarcoP - 09-04-2018
Thank you, Hubert!!!
This is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
It is absolutely worth reading.
Two of the notes that catch my attention:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - what appears to be an occurrence of "rot" in reddish paint (it seems this one does not appear You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). I think here there is little doubt that the colour was applied upon the annotation, obfuscating it. It's amazing to see a second occurrence of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. color annotation discussed by Touwaide!
f32r - an only partially reading annotation. Rene's description: "A 'p' and what looks like a 'v' or an 'r' in the bottom right flower. There could be another character after the 'p'." This is similar to the annotation in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (por?), but it cannot be the same, because the letter after the 'p' (if it does exist) cannot be an 'o'. The word could also resemble the annotation "prau[n]" in the Vicenza ms I mentioned above, but a flower seems more likely to be purple than brawn.
RE: [split] Color annotations? - ReneZ - 09-04-2018
Thanks (Sir) Hubert,
I remember the list of these extraneous writings that was made shortly after the first publication of the 2004 scans, but from the site maintained by GC: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , which was equally discontinued.
Several people had 'sub-sites' there, and the one giving the annotations undoubtedly was from the same source Rueben Ogburn. I even have a deja-vu feeling about writing this. (I may have had a similar exchange with Nick).
I first saw the 'r o t' of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in1999 when I saw the Voynich MS in the Beinecke. I did't interpret it as 'rot' at this time, but wondered if these were Greek letters that should be read with the head tilted 90 to the left, i.e. from bottom to top.
It only made real sense to me when I saw the Vicenza MS already mentioned by Marco above, with its colour annotations. I pointed them out to Alain Touwaide, when I met him in 2014, and I consider it valuable that he confirms this understanding in his article.
Edit: here's one wayback link to the voynich central page:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.