Possible match on f49r Snakes

[Jorge_Stolfi]

looking at these images I see what seems to me like another strong piece of evidence against retracing. If you look at the tiny short straight strokes filling the center of the "flower", denoting seeds or some other feature, they appear to be of all possible levels of darkness from the very faint to darker than the petals with no obvious sharp separation.

Indeed it is often hard to tell whether some stroke is original or retraced, because the latter may come out faint when the pen is running out of ink.  

The identification is more certain when the retracing is not perfect and the original can be seen, as in the SW corner of that "flower" (middle (A) and (B) arrows in the annotated pic).  Or when the Retracer makes a mistake that the Scribe could not possibly make.  Like those two cases in my earlier "quiz", when he turned an s into an o (because he missed the still visible plume) and a Sh into a hapax weirdo (because the start of the plume was lost and he reconnected it at the wrong end).  Or on page f73v, where he mistook the leg of the nymph at the NW corner for the edge of a "barrel", and proceeded to "restore" it.

With my superior pareidolia, honed by years or staring at low-res B&W images, I even see two rounds of restoration, probably spaced centuries apart. The first would have retraced a lot of the text and large parts of the drawings, but was very careful to preserve the original look. I believe this restoration even took longer than the original Scribing (which is usually the case in art restoration projects); say two hours per page, against half an hour;.  The second Retoucher was sloppier and only retouched parts that the first one had left intact or which were again fading; and added a lot of spurious detail (like the crowns on some nymphs).

In the case of those dots and dashes inside the faces of those "flowers", I would guess (but would not bet) that they were all added by the Retracer.  Check the other "flower"; see how those details are quite different there.  I guess that the original had only one or two concentric circles, thin and faint, nested inside the outline of the face.

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• Retracing and additions to the NE flower of f3v. (A-D) original traces: (A) outer circle (B) possible second circle, © possible third circle, (D) dash; (E) retracing of outer circle; (F-H) additions by Retracer: (F) petals, (G) radial hatching (H) dashed circles.
  

I would guess further that, in the original Source book from which the Author copied these "flowers", there was only one "flower" which was in fact a fruit (or maybe even a tuber) cut in half to show the internal structure.  Then the nested circles could have indicated a thick rind and pit or distinctive core.

Which, by the way, is my explanation for all those roots with a flat "platforms" from which the plant's stem grows: in the Source book they were cut away to show how the root looked like inside.  The Author and/or the Scribe would have mistaken those cuts for the actual shape of the part, and mistook fruits for flowers and vice-versa.

So to me it looks like these strokes just faded differently or were inked differently, producing a great variation in darkness. Same as what I believe happened to most of other strokes in the MS - something to do with the ink quality.

I don't think those normal processes could explain the patterns of ink density and pen width variations that I see all over the VMS.