No text, but a visual code

[Antonio García Jiménez]

The VM has been compared many times to the works of Giovanni Fontana, where a circle-line cipher is used. I reproduce the Fontana alphabet from Stephen Bax's page.

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Really, delving into the similarities of these contemporary works, the VM and Fontana's books, is a promising avenue. The first thing to consider is that the Fontana cipher does not hide anything, it is not designed to hide. Too easy having also text in Latin. So what did Fontana design it for, what's the point?

He was an engineer who was accused of witchcraft, but he was a proto-scientist. With his artifacts he created a kind of artificial magic. I think his cipher was a way to create a scientific language. The fact that its symbols have a geometric characteristic attests to this. The content was as important as the way of communicating his knowledge.

Can any of this be said about the Voynich script? In my opinion there is a parallel, the same impulse to create a kind of scientific and universal language. Only instead of using the Latin alphabet as a base source, it uses pictographic or ideographic symbols.