[split] Color annotations?

[Hubert Dale]

Hi all,

The letters on f20r and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. were both listed by Reuben Ogburn back in 2004.  His site now seems to have disappeared but you can still find it on the Wayback Machine:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
and, for what it's worth, I agree that they represent 'p' and 'r' respectively.

I don't think that every individual letter or short group one sees in and around the Voynich illustrations is necessarily a colour indication, and it's fairly obvious that they weren't all written by the same writing instrument (and probably at different times too).  But Marco's post above shows that there is one group of abbreviations in the VMS which really does look an awful lot like German examples seen elsewhere, both in terms of what is written and where they are placed.

I keep hoping that these colour indications might somehow give confirmation of meaningful content in the VMS.  If they were actually added by the scribe who produced the VMS, this would be pretty conclusive evidence that it 'mattered' that a plant's leaves or root were a particular colour.  But, sadly, I don't think we can be sufficiently confident that the colour annotations are of a piece with the manuscript's creation - and in fact I'm pretty sure that some cannot be.

My suspicion is that the manuscript may have been created circa 1430, and quickly came into the possession of someone who didn't understand the text and didn't really understand the illustrations either, and it was at this point that the confused and confusing process of its illumination - including colour indicators - began.  I'm not familiar with the current state of our understanding of this process, but I do know that the suggestion of multiple colourists and retouchers goes back to Stolfi.  German colour indicators added in 1450 might not have been understood by (say) an Italian painter working a century later?

Can anyone say whether the plants which have the colour indicators are those for which it's easy to come up with identifications?  Might someone in the fifteenth century have come across the unilluminated VMS, scratched their head, and gone to another illustrated herbal and matched plants and colours as best they could?