01-02-2017, 02:02 PM
The range avoided in the botanical imagery is, as I've been saying for some time,the range pink-mauve-purple-black with the naturally pink or reddish -mauve painted red, and the others blue.
I'm not sure why this might seem better expressed more generally as "darker" but doing so does tend to slide over the critical issues:
1. that a reasonable explanation has to be found for such avoidance.
2. that the explanation cannot argue an inadequate range of pigments: most people knew how to mix colours, and any survey of fifteenth century Latin manuscripts shows it is not a Latin European tabu.
3. When the manuscript's internal evidence offers a contradiction to the "Latin European author" theory, it is a contradiction of some importance.
Similarly, the form of the head on f.55v is of interest. A comparable pattern (using round, not square 'columns') is found employed on the Voynich map (the whole of that folio is a map, not just one detail in it). There, the pattern seems to me to represents a particular type of geological formation. But we also see the square sort in mosaics from the eastern Mediterranean during the pre-Christian and the early Byzantine period.
So in the original source(s) used for the Vms, was there some common idea - or better still some single word - which informed the thought behind all three?
I'm sure anyone who has read much of my work will be tired of hearing that pictures embody words, and ways of thought, and cultural attitudes, and that our aim should surely be less to work to promote a theory than to correctly identify the time, place, and culture which first produced this imagery.. and perhaps even the Voynich script.
That's how I see the task, anyway.
I'm not sure why this might seem better expressed more generally as "darker" but doing so does tend to slide over the critical issues:
1. that a reasonable explanation has to be found for such avoidance.
2. that the explanation cannot argue an inadequate range of pigments: most people knew how to mix colours, and any survey of fifteenth century Latin manuscripts shows it is not a Latin European tabu.
3. When the manuscript's internal evidence offers a contradiction to the "Latin European author" theory, it is a contradiction of some importance.
Similarly, the form of the head on f.55v is of interest. A comparable pattern (using round, not square 'columns') is found employed on the Voynich map (the whole of that folio is a map, not just one detail in it). There, the pattern seems to me to represents a particular type of geological formation. But we also see the square sort in mosaics from the eastern Mediterranean during the pre-Christian and the early Byzantine period.
So in the original source(s) used for the Vms, was there some common idea - or better still some single word - which informed the thought behind all three?
I'm sure anyone who has read much of my work will be tired of hearing that pictures embody words, and ways of thought, and cultural attitudes, and that our aim should surely be less to work to promote a theory than to correctly identify the time, place, and culture which first produced this imagery.. and perhaps even the Voynich script.
That's how I see the task, anyway.