Rosettes and Revelations Pt.1: The Holy City - Koen Gheuens and Cary Rapaport

[MichelleL11]

Hi, Koen and Cary:

Thanks for the obvious hard work on this -- very interesting observations.  I greatly appreciate the detailed analysis.  

I'm obviously pushing the next posting, but of course the biggest issue is that a seemingly very important reason why the "top-down" viewpoint was chosen was the ease of explicitly including the 12 gates and/or 12 angels (or apostles) etc. in the work.  This seems to be the most consistent text-based description provided in these top-down illustrations but not provided in illustrations done from other viewpoints.  And this is precisely what is missing from the Voynich fold-out, if the most visually striking component of the illustration -- the rosettes, are gates.

I do look forward to your discussion of why each rosette is not a gate or if they are gates why three of them are otherwise represented or whatever line of reasoning you and Cary decide to address this.  But it is always going to be an issue for me that what all the other illustrators of that time focused on (top-down = providing very clear cut representation of all 12 gates) was not obviously followed by the Voynich fold-out.

I suppose it could be the result of poor planning on the part of the Voynich illustrator (shoot, I've run out of room) -- but other aspects of the illustrations and text placement suggest some pretty detailed pre-planning was done.  The Voynich illustrator has his or her artistic quirks, that's for sure, but running out of room without accommodating it (e.g. the two Aries and the two Tauruses) seems to be something actually considered.