Crossbowman

[MarcoP]

...And I would like to add the following to R.Sale's question:

If an accurate identification is luckily achieved, then what this will give us? Will new oppotunities to advance appear in that case? Remember those guibelline merlons. Did they bring us forward?

Hi Anton, your use of "us" puzzles me. Do you mean that you find the guibelline merlons uninformative?

In my opinion, each single detail taken in isolation is irrelevant, but collecting all available clues, it is possible to come up with something informative. My point of view is that there are a number of elements suggesting a German origin: these include those resulting from analyses of the whole zodiac (such as that performed by JKP in a number of posts), the Crossbow (a detail in a much larger image cycle) and the color annotations mentioned by Rene and more recently by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 
There are also elements suggesting a Northern Italian origin. These include parallels with Italian herbals (again discussed by Rene, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and others, and confirmed by Touwaide) and the guibelline merlons.

What I get from all this is an Italian or German place of production for the manuscript. I would also include in-between areas as candidates (Switzerland and Tirol). 

Of course, the analysis of the images alone will not allow reading the manuscript: in order to move forward, the language must be taken in as well. It would be nice to further restrict the possible place of production, but even the larger area that I consider likely gives a number of useful constraints about the languages spoken there when the ms was written.

I discovered the Voynich manuscript through Stephen Bax' 2014 paper You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In one of the first pages Stephen notes that "scholars have tended to focus almost exclusively on European herbals and European languages, and ignored the potential value of herbal manuscripts from other cultures, for example in the Near East." I always thought and still think that the ms likely includes non-European features. Stephen's (and Derek Vogt's) more recent research suggests a possible Romany origin, hence a mainly Indian language that was already present in Europe in the early XV Century, with cultural influences from India, Persia and the Near East. My ignorance of non-Latin languages does not allow me to contribute much on this front, but I find the hypothesis well worth pursuing and compatible with both the recognizable and not-so-recognizable features in the images.