[Blog Post] An Allegory of Salvation (Koen Gheuens & Cary Rapaport)

[MatthewDean]

I concur with esteemed image-collector JKP the winepress is a provocative touchstone, and I personally think eminently reasonable, especially given the geography of examples which situate well with the Voynich evidence. Separately, Hildegard (invoked here and in other comments) is a worthy precedent to consider, in terms of chaine operatoire, to understand one cultural context and process for the generation of such a work. On my side of the Pyrenees, Beatus of Liebana is another, though the visual translation flowered well after the textual. In all there is as much a "singing out" as a flowing out, and it's long been my hope the text may prove to be incantative, if meaningful in whatever tongue, accounting for some of the legato repetitiveness, as recently observed independently by another friend. 

Your visual discourse also highlights well the confluence of (popularly) disparate zones of influence that actually commingle in the literate medieval mind (and material trade), including the Byzantine and the European. Those pursuing an intersection rather than an isolate are in my opinion more likely to forge further ahead. It could be fruitful to recall that even some of the most apparently inward mystic journeys (Hildegard, Beatus, the Sufis) were encouraged by institutions as adventures or tools of contact and dissemination, rather than of isolation or idiosyncrasy. (The Northern Spanish kingdoms were in some cases and times exempted from crusading due to their own peninsular goals, and as such encountered their own Jerusalem through different channels, changing the visual lexicon there).

In an oval in the middle of the famous tympanum sits Christ.

Here, though, I think more reading on the mandorla / vesica will help, including Seidel's "Legends in Limestone." There are other well-explored precedents for this enclosure in sculpture and illumination, earlier and with a different frame of mind than the Wound, though I don't discount the Wound may be present in the Voynich and mind of its author(s), or more to the point its scribes and illustrator(s).