06-04-2020, 04:38 PM
Stephen Carlson wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thanks for the wonderful chart. That Fontana MS is really impressive as a comparandum. I wonder if something like that was a model for how the VM should look, even though the process used to produce it must be different.
I have increasingly, over time, been thinking that Giovanni Fontana's work is a useful parallel. One thing I am curious about is where or when Fontana became familiar with ciphers. It is true his is a very simple cipher and therefore one might regard that as commonplace knowledge that he could have found easily. However I still wonder. His general qualifications don't make one think he would have been directed towards ciphers. One thing that interests me is that the Doge of Venice sent him to Brescia to deliver a message to the condottiere Francesco Carmagnola. This would of course have been a diplomatic mission, which makes me wonder if he had contact with early diplomatic ciphers; I haven't tried to investigate if this was the case or not perhaps I will some day.