In your opinion, did the writing of the VM start closer to 1412 or closer to 1440?

[ReneZ]

That 10% was actually 90% lost and it came from the August 2023 Hyperallergic article You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for which I posted You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. last year.

I'm glad that I remembered correctly. Thanks!

While it would be wrong to speculate on what exactly could be found in those lost items, it is always good to remember it, and also not make the other incorrect assumption, namely on what could NOT be found in those lost items.

A trivial remark, obviously, but it means that any striking resemblance between an illustration in the Voynich MS and another suriviving MS does not imply a direct or even close relationship between the two.

I've been around long enough to remember the time that we were still searching for the first zodiac emblem including a human with a crossbow. Bradley Schaefer referred to this in his Voynich MS paper published in Sky and Telescope, decades ago now.

And then there were a few years when we had exactly one, found in the course of the Austrian TV documentary.
Well, it wasn't discovered. The historian that showed it to me long knew it existed, but he was not aware that this was a point of interest for the Voynich MS untill he was confronted with that observation.

And now, as a result of ongoing digitisation projects and the searches of Darren Worley, Marco Ponzi and JK Petersen (the latter independently), we have dozens.

With the 'cosmos' illustration found by Ellie Velinska we are essentially still at one (1). There is not enough information to draw very specific conclusions about a relationship.

With the Lauber workshop it is a bit different, and a bit the same.
For that workshop we know that they would (also) use model books.

With Koen's searches for the mutant lobster, fortunately, several examples could be found.
For the Gemini pose, at least some examples were found outside of that workshop, IIRC.