If it feels like an Alberti Cipher it is one!

[davidjackson]

I spent a summer once making volvelles out of the VM. It was fun but eventually fruitless work.

Actually, I couldn't be bothered before to go into this, but since the topic has risen its head again I may as well.

It is quite easy to prove that the VM is not the product of an Alberti cipher ( or other polyalphabetic cipher).

In essence, this is because such ciphers create pseudo random cover text - they mask the frequency distribution of the plaintext.

But the VM corpus doesn't exhibit that characteristic. Quite the opposite. Instead, glyphs are highly positionally aware within vords.

Ergo, it is not the result of an Alberti cipher. Or if it were, it would quickly succumb to frequency analysis, which it doesn't.