[split] Jorge's Retracer Thread: darker ink, retracing of text and drawings

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Have you considered that the artist may have sketched with a pencil lead tip?

Yes.  It is a variant of the alternative "the Scribe himself went back and retraced parts that had come out faint or crooked"
I don't think o, for several reasons.  Among others:

• The retracing is often limited to parts of single glyphs or parts of the figure outlines.
  
• The original traces often clearly look like they were drawn with a pen, namely with broad strokes whose width varies with orientation and apparent speed -- only faded in various degrees.
  
• The parts that I think are retraced are often grossly wrong, like on that nymph. Sometimes they include invalid glyphs.  I don't see how that could happen if the Inker was the same person as the Penciler, or even if they were working for the same Author.
  
• My hypothetical Retracer had some specific obsessions, like the right breasts of the nymphs and the distinctive "showercap" diadems, that were not shared by the original Inker.
  
• In some places (liek f57v) the inked text and drawings are faded to the point of being almost invisible.  If any parts already looked like that before 1910, any owner who prized the manuscript (including the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano) would surely have wanted to restore them. 
  

And I think -- but I am not quite sure yet --- that there were at least two rounds of retracing, by different people.  The first one was more careful and used brown ink similar to the original.  The second one was clumsier and used a much darker ink, with a different tone, but retraced only a few parts that the first one had skipped, and a few parts that had been retraced but were again faded or damaged.

All the best, --jorge