09-11-2023, 10:58 AM
I don't think "outsider art" is a valid option at all, because it is a term used to describe certain phenomena in the artistic world starting in the 1800's. Take a look at this Wikipedia page of outsider artists: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You will see that art historians simply do not use this terminology to talk about medieval phenomena. If they do, it will be highly exceptional. I have noticed that in general, historians are hesitant to apply modern concepts to the ancient world, or at least advise caution when doing so.
Now it is possible that medieval "outsider artists" existed. But would they have been regarded as such, and seen themselves as such? How many manuscript artists were not trained in the major centers like Paris? How much training was required to sharpen the nib on a pen, prepare inks, write on vellum, prepare basic pigments... all things the Voynich makers clearly had experience with.
By doing these things already - being literate and producing a manuscript - the makers placed themselves among the most educated 10% of society. This is why the term "outsider art" becomes so problematic, because the practice of making a manuscript in the middle ages cannot be compared at all to the art scene of the 19th to 21st centuries. But by using the term "outsider art", we take all those modern connotations and transpose them one someone who lived in a different context, doing a different kind of activity.
That's the terminology question, which is of course separate from your arguments.
1. The problematic plants. It is clear that the VM artist knew how to draw plants and their parts, but the majority of the plants depicted in it are partially or entirely problematic. This in itself is not strange at all, since medieval herbals are not modern field books and only the most finely executed specimens produce reliable plant pictures. In many cases, stylized or fantastical elements are simply part of the tradition. The unusual thing is that we cannot link these plants, their selection and their order to any of the known herbal traditions. But even this is not unique. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. discussed on the forum some time ago starts out with established traditions, so it is certainly not "outsider art". But then it goes on to a section with hundreds of seemingly made-up plant drawings and descriptions.
The point is that producing recognizable plant pictures was not always the point of medieval plant manuscripts. So if we say that making up plants makes it a 'fantasy' and thus outsider art, we are projecting modern expectations and categories onto the medieval situation.
2. You point at the lack of corrections to suggest the existence of a creative flow. Now it is possible that the text was made this way, but the whole "no corrections" thing is a myth people just keep perpetuating because they hear others say it. People on the forum have pointed out plenty of places where the writing acts weird, and potential corrections. The problem is that we don't understand the text or even the writing system, so we cannot know what constitutes a correction or a mistake. If you were looking at an ancient Hebrew or Arabic text (assuming you can't read those scripts), would you be able to point out to me all the places where the scribe performed corrections? Of course not! Can you tell me all the techniques they would have used for correcting text, and how to recognize them? If you saw no clear signs of corrections, would you call the text fake? That's how silly the "no corrections" meme is.
There are also plenty of places in the drawings where the hypothetical "flow" is interrupted. My favorite is the one where they started drawing a nymph face in a pool, only to shift it a bit to a different location (it's somewhere on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. if you want to find it).
Apart from that, the sections with female figures are meticulously planned out and surprisingly consistent. The use of patterns, the nymphs' proportions... One of the hallmarks of "untrained" medieval art is wildly varying proportions of human bodies, but with a few exceptions, the hundreds of female figures in the VM are very consistent (see here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )
Also, if someone were creating "flow of consciousness" art, would they opt to add a bunch of celestial diagrams to their dozens of plant images? Is a scientific diagram really what the outsider artist likes to make? It feels to me like the polar opposite, since diagrams are by definition structured and planned out.
3. Quality of the drawing: I agree here to some extent. The painting is almost consistently bad to mediocre, but we don't know why this is the case. It is at time so bad, that some people like Nick Pelling (who spent a lot of time studying the manuscript) even suggest that someone else must have done the bad painting. But if you were to reduce the plant folios to line drawings, they are actually pretty good. It's not what you would present to a king, but that goes for most manuscripts.
In other sections, certain folios have a hurried feel to them, and show signs of being done quickly, being less refined than others. But this is far from the rule. In fact, we can only say that these folios look hurried because we can contrast them with the other ones.
Two examples that come to mind are the Zodiac section, where the nymphs get simpler and rougher as we progress, and the small-plants/Pharma section, where a similar gradual simplification takes place.
Now as I see it, the presence of these rushed pages is an argument for meaning of the images, not against. If you are just making up nonsense to fool someone but you're running out of time, you just take the dozens of pages you have already. You don't go on rushing in even more nymphs and pools and plants and then add a whole text-only section. Similarly, if you are creating l'art pour l'art (since we're doing anachronisms today) and just kind of flowing along, there is no reason to rush things, to get those last pages done.
If, however, you have a certain plan, schedule, assignment or an exemplar to copy... and you've already drawn a hundred nymphs but there are more and more to go. Then you might start slacking, cutting corners and rushing things.
4. "The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning." This is a problematic argument. Maybe the makers understands the meaning of contemporary texts so well that they can play around with them, making new versions, applying them to different contexts. We simply don't know. I don't understand what the scenario is here. So this person had access to a whole library of learned texts but didn't understand what they were seeing and then proceeded to spend considerable resources in making a dumb imitation of it?
5. About the text, the only thing we can say for certain, in my opinion, is that a lot of it appears systematic, but we don't understand yet what's going on.
You will see that art historians simply do not use this terminology to talk about medieval phenomena. If they do, it will be highly exceptional. I have noticed that in general, historians are hesitant to apply modern concepts to the ancient world, or at least advise caution when doing so.
Now it is possible that medieval "outsider artists" existed. But would they have been regarded as such, and seen themselves as such? How many manuscript artists were not trained in the major centers like Paris? How much training was required to sharpen the nib on a pen, prepare inks, write on vellum, prepare basic pigments... all things the Voynich makers clearly had experience with.
By doing these things already - being literate and producing a manuscript - the makers placed themselves among the most educated 10% of society. This is why the term "outsider art" becomes so problematic, because the practice of making a manuscript in the middle ages cannot be compared at all to the art scene of the 19th to 21st centuries. But by using the term "outsider art", we take all those modern connotations and transpose them one someone who lived in a different context, doing a different kind of activity.
That's the terminology question, which is of course separate from your arguments.
1. The problematic plants. It is clear that the VM artist knew how to draw plants and their parts, but the majority of the plants depicted in it are partially or entirely problematic. This in itself is not strange at all, since medieval herbals are not modern field books and only the most finely executed specimens produce reliable plant pictures. In many cases, stylized or fantastical elements are simply part of the tradition. The unusual thing is that we cannot link these plants, their selection and their order to any of the known herbal traditions. But even this is not unique. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. discussed on the forum some time ago starts out with established traditions, so it is certainly not "outsider art". But then it goes on to a section with hundreds of seemingly made-up plant drawings and descriptions.
The point is that producing recognizable plant pictures was not always the point of medieval plant manuscripts. So if we say that making up plants makes it a 'fantasy' and thus outsider art, we are projecting modern expectations and categories onto the medieval situation.
2. You point at the lack of corrections to suggest the existence of a creative flow. Now it is possible that the text was made this way, but the whole "no corrections" thing is a myth people just keep perpetuating because they hear others say it. People on the forum have pointed out plenty of places where the writing acts weird, and potential corrections. The problem is that we don't understand the text or even the writing system, so we cannot know what constitutes a correction or a mistake. If you were looking at an ancient Hebrew or Arabic text (assuming you can't read those scripts), would you be able to point out to me all the places where the scribe performed corrections? Of course not! Can you tell me all the techniques they would have used for correcting text, and how to recognize them? If you saw no clear signs of corrections, would you call the text fake? That's how silly the "no corrections" meme is.
There are also plenty of places in the drawings where the hypothetical "flow" is interrupted. My favorite is the one where they started drawing a nymph face in a pool, only to shift it a bit to a different location (it's somewhere on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. if you want to find it).
Apart from that, the sections with female figures are meticulously planned out and surprisingly consistent. The use of patterns, the nymphs' proportions... One of the hallmarks of "untrained" medieval art is wildly varying proportions of human bodies, but with a few exceptions, the hundreds of female figures in the VM are very consistent (see here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )
Also, if someone were creating "flow of consciousness" art, would they opt to add a bunch of celestial diagrams to their dozens of plant images? Is a scientific diagram really what the outsider artist likes to make? It feels to me like the polar opposite, since diagrams are by definition structured and planned out.
3. Quality of the drawing: I agree here to some extent. The painting is almost consistently bad to mediocre, but we don't know why this is the case. It is at time so bad, that some people like Nick Pelling (who spent a lot of time studying the manuscript) even suggest that someone else must have done the bad painting. But if you were to reduce the plant folios to line drawings, they are actually pretty good. It's not what you would present to a king, but that goes for most manuscripts.
In other sections, certain folios have a hurried feel to them, and show signs of being done quickly, being less refined than others. But this is far from the rule. In fact, we can only say that these folios look hurried because we can contrast them with the other ones.
Two examples that come to mind are the Zodiac section, where the nymphs get simpler and rougher as we progress, and the small-plants/Pharma section, where a similar gradual simplification takes place.
Now as I see it, the presence of these rushed pages is an argument for meaning of the images, not against. If you are just making up nonsense to fool someone but you're running out of time, you just take the dozens of pages you have already. You don't go on rushing in even more nymphs and pools and plants and then add a whole text-only section. Similarly, if you are creating l'art pour l'art (since we're doing anachronisms today) and just kind of flowing along, there is no reason to rush things, to get those last pages done.
If, however, you have a certain plan, schedule, assignment or an exemplar to copy... and you've already drawn a hundred nymphs but there are more and more to go. Then you might start slacking, cutting corners and rushing things.
4. "The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning." This is a problematic argument. Maybe the makers understands the meaning of contemporary texts so well that they can play around with them, making new versions, applying them to different contexts. We simply don't know. I don't understand what the scenario is here. So this person had access to a whole library of learned texts but didn't understand what they were seeing and then proceeded to spend considerable resources in making a dumb imitation of it?
5. About the text, the only thing we can say for certain, in my opinion, is that a lot of it appears systematic, but we don't understand yet what's going on.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)