Textual Complexity vs. Visual Simplicity

[Jorge_Stolfi]

One of the things that intrigues me most about the Voynich manuscript is the poor quality of its drawings. Whenever I’ve seen manuscripts from the 15th century or even later, the clumsiness of the Voynich illustrator is striking. The drawings are made almost in a single stroke, with no attempt at shading or adding the slightest grace to the figures. From the plants to the nymphs or the zodiac signs, they look like something a child of six or seven could have drawn.

The Scribe who actually put the text to parchment seems to have been fairly skilled with the quill, but apparently only at writing.  It seems that the VMS, and specifically the Zodiac pages, was the first job where he had to also draw figures. The Aries and Taurus pages seem to have been the earliest ones, and his "artistic ability", i we may use the term, clearly improved at each page.   At first he would draw each nymph with the lower half of her body strategically hidden inside a "tub", and the upper half fully dressed.  Or maybe he drew her torso naked at first, but then, a belated pang of prurience, went back and drew dresses over them.  Only after the first 3-4 pages he became bold enough to draw them fully naked, and developed the stereotypical pose that he would use for the rest of the job.

In style and skill, the Pisces illustration seems to be later than the first Aries, and possibly was drawn after the second Taurus. It is peculiar in several ways.  In It lies on the last page of the previous quire,  is a single diagram with 30 stars (actually 29 sectors, but an extra star and label at the center; probably a mistake),  has has the "tubs" turned into horizontal "pipes" or "barrels", etc.  I imagine that the scribing of that section must have been rather messy, possibly including a discarded first version of Pisces, and a change in layout being forced by shortage of parchment.

To his credit, the scale of text and drawings is quite small ("Objects in screen are smaller than they appear"), and the parchment must already have been rather rough and warped at the time.  I am not sure that one could do much better in those circumstances.

In other sections his artistic ability is much better, but he never got to fully master the art of perspective, or learn how to draw nymphs in more varied poses.  For instance, cylindrical objects like roots or flowers are drawn with the body in side view but withe the visible end shaped either as a circle or as a football, rather than an ellipse.

All the best, --jorge