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The VM as Outsider Art - zosima - 09-11-2023

Hello VM scholars! Here is my little essay on the nature of the VM, prompted by a cursory glance through the Yale University edition of 2016. I realize that this is a bit of a different approach than most here, but I'd love to hear any thoughts.  

The moment when I first felt that I understood what the VM really was occurred the first time I got a good look at the large central fold-out with the 9 mandalas. When I got a chance to closely inspect that, it became perfectly clear to me that there was simply no way that this explosion of profuse, mad detail represented meaningful information that was part of any tradition. This was clearly the free, exuberant play of fanciful imagination, and should be understood in the tradition of outsider art, fantasy fiction and the unbounded, propulsive forces of compulsive graphomania. The recipe of something like 90% Adolf Wolfi and Henry Darger and 10% JRR Tolkien and Leonardo DaVinci came at once to mind. In particular, the mandala in the upper left corner, with it’s weird protruding tubules and dizzying arrays of nested semi-circles outed the MS for me as belonging solidly in the tradition of visionary art.
 
Once this insight flooded over me, the other strange details of the illustrations and text started to become less mysterious. I’ll list what are to me the most salient points of the MS here, and detail them below.

1. This is an Herbal of plants that do not exist.
2. There is a strong impression of continuous creative flow throughout the MS.
3. The general quality of the illustrations is medium-low, like elaborate doodling.
4. The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning.
5. The text has certain characteristics suggesting it may be something more along the lines of a representation of text rather than meaningful writing.

This is an Herbal of plants that do not exist.
When confronted with a mystery, there is a natural tendency to plunge right in and start hammering away at the nittyest of gritty details. With the VM, this is best represented by the first serious investigator William Newbold, who thought that secret microscopic marks within the letters themselves represented some sort of code waiting to be cracked. His resulting interpretations were almost as fanciful as the grotesqueries of the MS itself. Unfortunately for him, a consensus soon emerged that these marks were simply physical artifacts of the ancient ink drying on vellum. Newbold’s approach epitomizes in an almost parodic way the intense, contrived, scrupulously detailed efforts at “decipherment” that have characterized investigations of the VM ever since. I argue the opposite approach is necessary. We need to stand as far back from the MS as possible and try to gain a general impression of what sort of thing this is and what traditions it best fits into. Pausing to absorb this forest’s particular aroma and aura for a while before plunging in will save us from toiling down many a path that ends in a dead thicket of weeds and brambles.

This fatal urge to decipher clues has characterized most interpretations of the botanical section of the MS. Sure, you might manage to convince some people (even me) that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. represents Cannabis, but this approach stubbornly turns its back on what must be the most plain and glaring fact about the botanical illustrations – that they are a flaming heap of ludicrous nonsense. Even by the admittedly low standards of early 15th century botanical illustration, the plants of the VM are blatantly silly. Sprouts emerge from a common root, put out leaves, then grow back into each other (F5v, F23r, F40r). Bizarre tubers abound, resembling Ernst Hackel’s fantastic sea creatures more than any root. Most interestingly to me, shoots often emerge from stems in a profoundly un-botanical fashion that recalls the plumbing seen in the balneological section (F9r, F11r, F13r, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and v, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and many others). While some illustrations can be found to resemble actual plants, there is simply no way that something like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can ever be decisively correlated to a known species. Whatever resemblances to actual plants that can be found in the herbal illustrations are readily explained by the fact that stereotyped depictions of generic plants must occasionally have some random resemblance to real plants. The compulsion to decrypt clues and the craving for an aha! moment have sent many investigators down rabbit holes and blinded them to the big-picture view of what they are looking at. The hasty, sketchy quality of the illustrations and the frankly sloppy application of color also hint that an attempt to represent reality is not going on here.

Instead of plunging into attempts to interpret, let’s stand back and ask the hardest possible question – why would someone create an Herbal of plants that do not exist? Even without answering it, this question eliminates most interpretations of the VM that have been produced to date. Voynich simply cannot be an encoded text relating to contemporary botanical, alchemical or astrological discourses. It must be some sort of fantasy produced by someone aware of these discourses but working outside of them. We are left with the other class of explanations including outsider art, fraud or even parody.

There is a strong impression of continuous creative flow throughout the MS.
The psychological concept of “flow” was first articulated by Hungarian-America psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (whose patronymic might remind some of Voynichese). Psychologist Charlotte Doyle elegantly summarizes flow thus -

The concept of flow, an experience of total engagement in an activity, was introduced into psychology by Csikszentmihalyi (1975) based primarily on first-hand accounts in a variety of domains. He found examples in physical activities such as rock climbing, sports (where it is also known as being in the zone), games such as chess, religious rituals, occupational activities such as surgery, and creating in the arts (creative flow). Csikszentmihalyi (1999) described the elements of the flow experience this way: The sense of having stepped out of the routines of everyday life into a different reality (See also Schutz, 1945), clear goals every step of the way, immediate feedback, effortless attention, action and awareness merged, balance between skill and challenge, time distortion, and spontaneity.
The concept of flow has a particular relevance to interpretations of the VM, particularly with reference to the unusual lack of corrections, erasures or re-working in the text or illustrations. Aside from the obvious weirdness of the illustrations and script, there is another peculiarity evident in the VM – the seamless, flowing uninterrupted creativity that seems to have created it. Whoever made this thing was having a jolly old time and really cranked it out. Even before I investigated the issues surrounding the text, this strong impression of creative flow made me very skeptical of suggestions that manuscript was enciphered. The pages just don’t have the labored, crabbed appearance of a text created though tedious encryption. Instead, the layout of the text and illustrations give the impression of a document produced under the impetus of free creative flow. In particular, the way the text and illustrations are intermingled argue against the sort of deliberate planning that one would expect in a coded text.

The general quality of the illustrations is medium-low, like elaborate doodling.
Since attempts to interpret the content of the illustrations have generally led to mystification, it may be instructive to analyze their general quality instead. The lush, carefully planned illustrations of more famous contemporary manuscripts (such as books of hours) provide quite a contrast with the hasty drawings of the VM. While somewhat above the level of idle sketches or doodles, the VM illustrations nevertheless convey an impression of hurry, of ideas developing in progress, and a process of unfolding development rather than pre-planned exposition. This can be seen at a much higher level in the notebooks of Leonardo, or perhaps at a lower level in the works of schizophrenic artists like Adolf Wolfi, who intermingle text and free-flowing illustration. These characteristics suggest that the process that led to the creation of the VM was like that involved in the creation of artworks, rather than the planned process of exposition involved in the production of books on conventional topics. It also suggests that the book was created for private or personal reasons, rather than for presentation to the public or a group.

The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning.
The VM bears a compelling similarity to a range of contemporary documents concerning botany, astrology and perhaps alchemy. Yet on a closer look, the illustrations differ significantly from those found in contemporary works. The plants in the herbal section do not resemble actual plants. While containing parts of the traditional zodiac, the great mass of elements in the astrological illustrations bear no relation to anything found in other books. Pictures of people in baths abound in alchemical texts, but never with the fantastical plumbing we are treated to in the VM. This same superficial similarity to familiar things, masking an underlying, but not too deeply hidden strangeness is also apparent in the alphabet and text. The VM text certainly looks like writing, but any would-be interpreters soon start picking up hints that something very weird is going on. Typically, this leads to the thought that the MS is written in code. This is not the only possibility though. What if the text, like the illustrations themselves, has a superficial resemblance to things found in other books, but is better categorized as fantasy?

The text has certain characteristics suggesting it may be something more along the lines of a representation of text rather than meaningful writing.
Attempts at reading the text typically start by assuming a one-to-one correlation of the Voynich letters with the letters of a known alphabet. Certain characteristics of the text, though, soon make it clear that such attempts are hopelessly doomed. Good luck translating something like “axxona axon axxonna ax xona.” The VM is filled with such nonsense. Certain letters gravitate weirdly to the beginnings or ends of words. There are pages with certain letter combinations appearing again and again at the ends or beginnings of words. These aberrant characteristics of the text lead me to suggest that it may represent neither a natural language nor an encoded language, but a rather a representation of writing. The author may even have been illiterate and produced the writing in a compulsive or automatic fashion as they spoke aloud to themselves while narrating the imagined contents of the book.

Whatever the nature of the writing may be, the nonsensical plants in the botanical section, and the sheer exuberant weirdness of the astrological and balenological sections indicate to me that the manuscript is not part of a wider tradition. While many problems are solved by zooming in and cracking a code or toiling to make a breakthrough discovery, there are other problems best resolved by stepping back and evaluating the general characteristics of the issue. The rewarding sense of satisfaction we derive from codebreaking and brilliant discoveries can delude us into seeing mysteries where none exist. While the VM is certainly mysterious and unique, that mystery may only be resolvable by the impossible dream of tracing the transient fantasies of one isolated and abnormal creative individual 600 years ago.


RE: The VM as Outsider Art - oshfdk - 09-11-2023

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here is my little essay on the nature of the VM, prompted by a cursory glance through the Yale University edition of 2016.

Thank you for the essay! Personally, I like all new texts about the MS, there is always something to ponder over.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I realize that this is a bit of a different approach than most here, but I'd love to hear any thoughts.

I'd say what you present is more of less "the default hypothesis" about the Voynich manuscript at least for the recent decades. I've looked up "outsider art" in the Voynich maillist, the first result I found was a discussion in 2014 in the context of looking for counter-arguments to this hypothesis. I suppose, the reason your essay is different from most other things I read here is because these other discussions are attempts to find something over and beyond this default hypothesis.

Overall, my favorite outsider/individual art hypothesis is the XKCD version  Smile

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The lush, carefully planned illustrations of more famous contemporary manuscripts (such as books of hours) provide quite a contrast with the hasty drawings of the VM. While somewhat above the level of idle sketches or doodles, the VM illustrations nevertheless convey an impression of hurry, of ideas developing in progress, and a process of unfolding development rather than pre-planned exposition.

I don't think it's reasonable to compare illustrations in the Voynich manuscript to the top quality artwork of the time. When researching planetary charts, I've looked through quite a few technical astrological/astronomical manuscripts of the XI - XV centuries, and I'd say the quality of the drawings in VMS is high compared to these other manuscripts. Especially if you discount the coloring job and focus on line drawings only. Also a lot of charts show large numbers of evenly spaced elements/figures, the positions of which were most certainly preplanned when starting the drawing.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While the VM is certainly mysterious and unique, that mystery may only be resolvable by the impossible dream of tracing the transient fantasies of one isolated and abnormal creative individual 600 years ago.

I tend to disagree, even if the Voynich manuscript is a personal fantasy work of one isolated artist and has no meaningful text, the size of the work and its structure can make it possible to get some understanding of the underlying ideas. Could be hard, but I'm not sure it's impossible.


RE: The VM as Outsider Art - zosima - 09-11-2023

I'm surprised to hear that "Ousider art" is the default hypothesis, since most discussions I've encountered seem to be centered on deciphering the text and illustrations. Can you point out some other sources that elaborate the outsider art hypothesis?


RE: The VM as Outsider Art - oshfdk - 09-11-2023

(09-11-2023, 05:23 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm surprised to hear that "Ousider art" is the default hypothesis, since most discussions I've encountered seem to be centered on deciphering the text and illustrations. Can you point out some other sources that elaborate the outsider art hypothesis?

Outsider art is one of the variations of the default hypothesis. The default hypothesis as of recently seems to be that the Voynich manuscript doesn't contain any meaningful message and is one of: 1) a hoax 2) glossolalia 3) angel tongues (channelling). At least most recent articles I've seen that directly address the text and are not withdrawn/refuted shortly after being published usually focus on various ways of producing large amounts of meaningless text with the statistical properties of Voynichese.

I think the overview of the manuscript from Wikipedia lists many of these theories. It mentions outsider art in this section: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The reason most discussions you've encountered seem to be centered on deciphering the text is probably that there is really not that much to discuss if we assume that the text is meaningless. Sort of looking under the lamppost scenario. However, I think it's possible to find many past discussions that are centered on meaningless text and its statistical properties. Maybe looking up Timm Torsten's threads would be a good starting point, I'm sure there are many others who contributed to this too.


RE: The VM as Outsider Art - ReneZ - 09-11-2023

I also wouldn't say that 'outsider art' is in any way a default hypothesis, but it certainly should be considered a valid option.
The first proponent of this that I remember is Dennis Stallings, writing around the year 2000.
Unfortunately, his summary web page does not seem to say anything about it:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I agree that the creator(s) of this MS knew what contemporary philosophical (scientific) works looked like, and there is a clear attempt to make something similar, though the execution is quite unique.

I also don't think that 'meaningless' is quite the default hypothesis yet, though I consider it  a distinct possibility.


RE: The VM as Outsider Art - oshfdk - 09-11-2023

(09-11-2023, 07:05 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I also don't think that 'meaningless' is quite the default hypothesis yet, though I consider it  a distinct possibility.

Maybe this is just my impression. At least looking at publications of past 10 years, I know of a few that argue for some version of meaningless text hypothesis, but I can't remember any single one that would argue for a meaningful interpretation and would be generally accepted as viable.


RE: The VM as Outsider Art - merrimacga - 09-11-2023

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hello VM scholars! Here is my little essay on the nature of the VM, prompted by a cursory glance through the Yale University edition of 2016. I realize that this is a bit of a different approach than most here, but I'd love to hear any thoughts.  

Clearly you have already given this a lot of thought. I hope you will continue exploring this and develop your theory further.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The recipe of something like 90% Adolf Wolfi and Henry Darger and 10% JRR Tolkien and Leonardo DaVinci came at once to mind.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.2. There is a strong impression of continuous creative flow throughout the MS.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Aside from the obvious weirdness of the illustrations and script, there is another peculiarity evident in the VM – the seamless, flowing uninterrupted creativity that seems to have created it.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.4. The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning.

Funny you should mention Da Vinci as one of my current theories is that the VM was originally the loose vellum sheets of notes of the original author written over many years, possibly decades, possibly including additional loose notes by others who inherited it from the original author. Much the same as Da Vinci's journals. The way the text flows and the rough nature of the botanical drawings suggest this. Further, I think it likely the original author had some higher education and exposure to other existing texts but that this education was probably incomplete. It is unlikely the author was anyone who would be remembered today, else someone would likely have identified the person by now. And I think it likely he or she practiced herbalism, alchemy, pharmacology and or medicine in a fairly remote area, possibly in some secrecy. Call it a working theory. Like you, I have a long, long way to go before I would classify it as anything more than that.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.1. This is an Herbal of plants that do not exist.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.3. The general quality of the illustrations is medium-low, like elaborate doodling.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sure, you might manage to convince some people (even me) that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. represents Cannabis, but this approach stubbornly turns its back on what must be the most plain and glaring fact about the botanical illustrations – that they are a flaming heap of ludicrous nonsense. Even by the admittedly low standards of early 15th century botanical illustration, the plants of the VM are blatantly silly. Sprouts emerge from a common root, put out leaves, then grow back into each other (F5v, F23r, F40r). Bizarre tubers abound, resembling Ernst Hackel’s fantastic sea creatures more than any root. Most interestingly to me, shoots often emerge from stems in a profoundly un-botanical fashion that recalls the plumbing seen in the balneological section (F9r, F11r, F13r, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and v, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and many others). While some illustrations can be found to resemble actual plants, there is simply no way that something like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can ever be decisively correlated to a known species.

That first line is an interesting way to phrase this but here is a different take. Rather than being fantastical plants (though fancifully drawn), my theory is all of these plants existed but at least some were (a) experimental and/or (b) became extinct sometime later. Add to this that the plant drawings are rather crude and inexact by comparison to other herbals of the time coupled with some unrealistic features that were characteristic of medieval herbals (at least the VM doesn't have any anthropomorphized mandrakes or human faces in the plants). There are elements in the VM that suggest it is partially alchemical, making it possible, if not likely, that at least some of the plants are experimental. Grafting techniques have existed for millennia. The VM author may have taken such experimentation much further. It is estimated that almost 600 plant species have become extinct since Carl Linnaeus published Species Plantarum in 1753. Who knows how many more species became extinct between 1400 and then? It is also theorized the VM originated somewhere in Central Europe, an area that contains several old growth or primeval forests currently that were likely much larger back then with additional forests that no longer exist. Even today, these forests contain many rare and unique species of plants. Imagine how many more such plants existed in that area back then. It is estimated there are currently 300,000-400,000 known species of plants in the world today. Mother Nature is highly inventive. Just look at currently known plants like the very large rafflesia, the gigantic titan arum, and the carnivorous Venus fly trap and somehow the VM plants no longer seem as unlikely.

Naturally, all this makes it highly unlikely we will be able to identify many, if any, of the VM plants with any degree of certainty as matching any extinct or extant plant. But not being able to do so is insufficient cause and even less proof that they are only imaginary.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It must be some sort of fantasy produced by someone aware of these discourses but working outside of them. We are left with the other class of explanations including outsider art, fraud or even parody.

(09-11-2023, 12:53 AM)zosima Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While the VM is certainly mysterious and unique, that mystery may only be resolvable by the impossible dream of tracing the transient fantasies of one isolated and abnormal creative individual 600 years ago.

If you haven't already you might look at this thread on the VM and visionary art, where we also delved into the concept of medieval worldbuilding: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

If we consider the VM to be simply a fantasy, especially if we believe it was created by an isolated individual, we have to consider the time, the effort and the money it took to create it. You might want to check out this thread I started: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It is estimated it took 14-15 entire calfskins to create the VM. Even if it was average quality, that much vellum would have been costly, probably too costly for creating merely a fantasy, a fraud/hoax, or a parody. Is it realistic to presume the author would have made this much effort to create such a work for such a reason when very few, if any, others would ever be able to read and understand it? And if it is a fantasy, why not create a more obvious novelization or play or poem instead of something that looks more like a botanical treatise?

All that said, I am in no way discounting your theory, though I may not entirely agree with it. But I would like to see you flesh it out more, go into more detail, consider how your theory could be disproven and if you can't disprove it, include what you referenced in the attempt and how you countered it. I think you have made some excellent points and it is a good beginning.


RE: The VM as Outsider Art - Koen G - 09-11-2023

I don't think "outsider art" is a valid option at all, because it is a term used to describe certain phenomena in the artistic world starting in the 1800's. Take a look at this Wikipedia page of outsider artists: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

You will see that art historians simply do not use this terminology to talk about medieval phenomena. If they do, it will be highly exceptional. I have noticed that in general, historians are hesitant to apply modern concepts to the ancient world, or at least advise caution when doing so.



Now it is possible that medieval "outsider artists" existed. But would they have been regarded as such, and seen themselves as such? How many manuscript artists were not trained in the major centers like Paris? How much training was required to sharpen the nib on a pen, prepare inks, write on vellum, prepare basic pigments... all things the Voynich makers clearly had experience with. 



By doing these things already - being literate and producing a manuscript - the makers placed themselves among the most educated 10% of society. This is why the term "outsider art" becomes so problematic, because the practice of making a manuscript in the middle ages cannot be compared at all to the art scene of the 19th to 21st centuries. But by using the term "outsider art", we take all those modern connotations and transpose them one someone who lived in a different context, doing a different kind of activity.



That's the terminology question, which is of course separate from your arguments. 


1. The problematic plants. It is clear that the VM artist knew how to draw plants and their parts, but the majority of the plants depicted in it are partially or entirely problematic. This in itself is not strange at all, since medieval herbals are not modern field books and only the most finely executed specimens produce reliable plant pictures. In many cases, stylized or fantastical elements are simply part of the tradition. The unusual thing is that we cannot link these plants, their selection and their order to any of the known herbal traditions. But even this is not unique. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. discussed on the forum some time ago starts out with established traditions, so it is certainly not "outsider art". But then it goes on to a section with hundreds of seemingly made-up plant drawings and descriptions.

The point is that producing recognizable plant pictures was not always the point of medieval plant manuscripts. So if we say that making up plants makes it a 'fantasy' and thus outsider art, we are projecting modern expectations and categories onto the medieval situation.

2. You point at the lack of corrections to suggest the existence of a creative flow. Now it is possible that the text was made this way, but the whole "no corrections" thing is a myth people just keep perpetuating because they hear others say it. People on the forum have pointed out plenty of places where the writing acts weird, and potential corrections. The problem is that we don't understand the text or even the writing system, so we cannot know what constitutes a correction or a mistake. If you were looking at an ancient Hebrew or Arabic text (assuming you can't read those scripts), would you be able to point out to me all the places where the scribe performed corrections? Of course not! Can you tell me all the techniques they would have used for correcting text, and how to recognize them? If you saw no clear signs of corrections, would you call the text fake? That's how silly the "no corrections" meme is.

There are also plenty of places in the drawings where the hypothetical "flow" is interrupted. My favorite is the one where they started drawing a nymph face in a pool, only to shift it a bit to a different location (it's somewhere on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. if you want to find it).

Apart from that, the sections with female figures are meticulously planned out and surprisingly consistent. The use of patterns, the nymphs' proportions... One of the hallmarks of "untrained" medieval art is wildly varying proportions of human bodies, but with a few exceptions, the hundreds of female figures in the VM are very consistent (see here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) 

Also, if someone were creating "flow of consciousness" art, would they opt to add a bunch of celestial diagrams to their dozens of plant images? Is a scientific diagram really what the outsider artist likes to make? It feels to me like the polar opposite, since diagrams are by definition structured and planned out.

3. Quality of the drawing: I agree here to some extent. The painting is almost consistently bad to mediocre, but we don't know why this is the case. It is at time so bad, that some people like Nick Pelling (who spent a lot of time studying the manuscript) even suggest that someone else must have done the bad painting. But if you were to reduce the plant folios to line drawings, they are actually pretty good. It's not what you would present to a king, but that goes for most manuscripts.

In other sections, certain folios have a hurried feel to them, and show signs of being done quickly, being less refined than others. But this is far from the rule. In fact, we can only say that these folios look hurried because we can contrast them with the other ones. 

Two examples that come to mind are the Zodiac section, where the nymphs get simpler and rougher as we progress, and the small-plants/Pharma section, where a similar gradual simplification takes place. 

Now as I see it, the presence of these rushed pages is an argument for meaning of the images, not against. If you are just making up nonsense to fool someone but you're running out of time, you just take the dozens of pages you have already. You don't go on rushing in even more nymphs and pools and plants and then add a whole text-only section. Similarly, if you are creating l'art pour l'art (since we're doing anachronisms today) and just kind of flowing along, there is no reason to rush things, to get those last pages done.

If, however, you have a certain plan, schedule, assignment or an exemplar to copy... and you've already drawn a hundred nymphs but there are more and more to go. Then you might start slacking, cutting corners and rushing things.


4. "The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning." This is a problematic argument. Maybe the makers understands the meaning of contemporary texts so well that they can play around with them, making new versions, applying them to different contexts. We simply don't know. I don't understand what the scenario is here. So this person had access to a whole library of learned texts but didn't understand what they were seeing and then proceeded to spend considerable resources in making a dumb imitation of it?

5. About the text, the only thing we can say for certain, in my opinion, is that a lot of it appears systematic, but we don't understand yet what's going on.


RE: The VM as Outsider Art - ReneZ - 09-11-2023

Well, I am not into art history, but I tend to understand the term "outsider art" to be the equivalent of what its specific meaning may be nowadays. 
Off the main-stream, for example.
I hesitate to consider the MS to be a piece of art, so prrhaps the term 'outsider philosophy' might be more appropriate.


RE: The VM as Outsider Art - Antonio García Jiménez - 09-11-2023

I think like René that the VM has nothing to do with art. It is like a philosophy, and not so strange if we consider the importance of astrology at the time, which was even a university subject.