How good is your pareidolia?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Sorry for stating the obvious, but a magnifying glass, especially the wearable watchmaker kind, can certainly put the visual acuity for most people far above of what was possible for anyone in the 1400s

Yes, I should try that.  I am even thinking of getting glasses made that will restore my old nearsightness...

Being able to focus on things 10 cm away instead of 40 cm is like using a 4x magnifying lens.  Surely there were plenty of myopic people in the 1400s too...

My question was not why attempt retouching, but why perform it with what I see as nearly superhuman accuracy. After all, a text is a text. Unless the retoucher was somehow sure that a microstroke/microglyph encoding was used, I see no reason to try restoring every minute detail of every stroke. 

Suppose that the owner of a badly faded, 200-year-old manuscript were to try to restore it -- today.   A manuscript that may have been bought by an emperor for 600 gold coins.  Would he be satisfied with crudely re-writing the text  over the faded original, leaving the later visible?  Especially considering that neither he nor the person he hired for the job knew what was the alphabet, hence could not tell whether a tall plume was equivalent to a squat one?

And moreover, if all he wanted was to preserve the text, he would just make a copy on new blank vellum. 

Again, the retracing that I see is like the restoration of a valued painting.  The owner does not want merely a portrait of a chubby smiling lady; he want the portrait to look like it must have looked right after Leonardo painted it -- with no obvious sign that it was painted over.

On the other hand, I believe that there were at least two restoration episodes, and the second one was more limited but much sloppier than the first one.  It did not even try to approximate the color of the original ink.

One possibility that could explain the perfect retouching in the VMS is if due to some properties of the ink and the vellum it would be enough just to add a drop of ink to any part of a dry stroke and it would fill the same shape, with the wet ink sticking to dry ink or oxidized vellum. However, the imperfect retouch job on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. seems to disprove this, with faint stroke outlines clearly visible next to the dark strokes (at least for Sh).

That could be possible, and I even think I can see some evidence of it, e.g.in this clip from f8r, line 4, just after the plant:

   

Looking closely, it seems that, when C of the Ch was retraced, some of the ink flowed into the loop of the k, for ~0,5 mm or so.

However, this phenomenon does not explain the cases where the Retracer added strokes that were not there, like the item B in my original post (where he extended the plume at the wrong end, turning a plain Sh into an "impossible" weirdo) or the honors item (where he completed the body of an s into an o).

And, on that same clip, note how the apparently retraced ligature stroke is unusually broad and has a butt (square) right end, tilted 45 degrees -- just like a normal broad pen stroke.

Also it seems unlikely that ink could flow that way over the whole leg of a t.  

All the best, --jorge