Colors

[VViews]

Interesting Wladimir D, and I agree about your last statement.

I looked at the folios you mentioned and had a bit of a surprise when looking at 22v. Is that a "G", or possibly "A G" in one of the leaves or is it a trick of the paint? It appears in both the jasondavies and Beinecke scans.


Based on Stirnemann and Petzold's articles, A G might indicate gold (Aurum) and Green... and these happen to be the two colors that are used in the leaves and stems. But this might just all be a trick of the paint/scans/bleedthrough.

Going back to those articles I mentioned above, it is interesting to note that the authors disagree about who the annotations were intended for: Stirnemann argues that they are reminders left by the artist for himself, while Petzold believes they are a sign of collaborative work and the division of labor.

Both authors note that these annotations show that the artists were literate and probably multilingual, combining latin and vernacular in their annotations.
Both authors explain that the usual process was to do one color at a time, for example, all of the yellow would have been added to the MS, then all of the red, etc... which seems really consistent with what we see in the Voynich (and is also compatible with Anton's observation above).