Poggio certainly has the right kind of profile...
...scholar, copyist, hunter-of-books, and (interestingly) he studied Latin and notarial law (which is significant because litterae elongata were frequently used to dress up and semi-fraud-proof legal documents, a detail that would certainly be noticed by a copyist).
Also, he traveled from Tuscany (which had been at the southern reaches of the Holy Roman Empire and the earlier Lombardic empire) to Bari which, at the time, still retained some of the same Lombardic colonist roots as Salerno and Naples (in other words, there were strong ethnic and scholarly ties between the multicultural Bari and northern Italy) and was, I believe, one of the conduits for the transmission of herbal/medical manuscripts.
Unfortunately, even if Poggio was somehow involved in the VMS project, I don't think his handwriting is in the manuscript. He was said to have a beautiful book hand and whoever wrote the marginalia on the last page, and the scribes who write the main text, clearly were not book-hand calligraphers or any kind of professional calligrapher. They don't even hold their quills at the right angle, a habit that calligraphers quickly learn and usually maintain even in their casual writing. The VMS is tidy, neat writing, but there's a big gap between that and the hand of a calligrapher, even if the scribe is writing in a curisve hand for less formal occasions, one can tell the difference.
But I'm nevertheless intrigued by the story that there may have been a 'secret project' in which he was involved and the sum that was paid. It's a very interesting trail. Thanks for posting.
...scholar, copyist, hunter-of-books, and (interestingly) he studied Latin and notarial law (which is significant because litterae elongata were frequently used to dress up and semi-fraud-proof legal documents, a detail that would certainly be noticed by a copyist).
Also, he traveled from Tuscany (which had been at the southern reaches of the Holy Roman Empire and the earlier Lombardic empire) to Bari which, at the time, still retained some of the same Lombardic colonist roots as Salerno and Naples (in other words, there were strong ethnic and scholarly ties between the multicultural Bari and northern Italy) and was, I believe, one of the conduits for the transmission of herbal/medical manuscripts.
Unfortunately, even if Poggio was somehow involved in the VMS project, I don't think his handwriting is in the manuscript. He was said to have a beautiful book hand and whoever wrote the marginalia on the last page, and the scribes who write the main text, clearly were not book-hand calligraphers or any kind of professional calligrapher. They don't even hold their quills at the right angle, a habit that calligraphers quickly learn and usually maintain even in their casual writing. The VMS is tidy, neat writing, but there's a big gap between that and the hand of a calligrapher, even if the scribe is writing in a curisve hand for less formal occasions, one can tell the difference.
But I'm nevertheless intrigued by the story that there may have been a 'secret project' in which he was involved and the sum that was paid. It's a very interesting trail. Thanks for posting.