No text, but a visual code

[Hermes777]

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.

This is very close to my point of view now Antonio, and I'm sympathetic to your approach. I see the work as arising out of the Lllullian revival in northern Italy in the 1400s, primarily through Catalan scholars teaching Ramon Lllull's systems at the University of Padua. The text appears to be a symbolic system of complex combinatorics. While I have traced those ideas to Nicholas of Cusa, Fontana is the much more likely candidate - both men studied Llull at the University of Padua. 

In this view the characters - an eclectic assembly of letters, numbers, abbreviations and sundry manuscript marks - have fixed non-linguistic significations. In the nature of the book, they could well be astrological. And the characters could have been selected according to a pictographic scheme. Vords, and perhaps other units eg. lines, are like formulae, symbols combined according to set (quite complex) rules. I think it is worthwhile considering the text in this way. Not as a language, not as a hoax, but as a Llullian folly. 

Although, we must then explain why these symbols are arranged to have every appearance of being a written text. It is tempting to conclude, with Friedman, that it might be an attempt at a symbolic apriori constructed language. Quite a feat, and ahead of its time, but Liebniz was right to see such an idea already present in Lllull's Ars Combinatoria. 

In any case, it is entirely clear that, in the first instance, the work concerns (1) the herbs of the earth and (2) the stars above. And it is a pharmacological treatise and therefore concerns how to extract celestial powers from herbs.

What sort of symbolic language would be appropriate for this purpose?  

Fontana (a native Ladin speaker) is a good candidate, most likely during his duties as a Municipal Physician with oversight of apothecaries.