Alchemical Symbolism in the VMS

[Koen G]

So here is another theory: when the VMS Scribe was copying plant parts from another herbal, which happened to have been created in a German-speaking area, he saw the "rot" color key on the stem of that plant, and --- not speaking German -- thought that it was a Voynichese label that had to be copied too.  So he did, striving to interpret the German letters as Voynichese letters...

It's an interesting idea, though I'm not clear on the details. If the Voynich scribe was copying from another herbal, why would he think the color annotation is a Voynichese label? This is a bit awkward, since it assumes a document in Voynichese with German color annotations to begin with.

For the color annotations, I see basically two options:

1) Someone wrote them and intended them as color annotations, either for a later painter or as a "note to self" for later painting. For some reason unknown to us, these instructions were not followed very well. We have some evidence to suggest that not all colors were available in all stages of the painting process (see for example the lack of red in Herbal B pages, the limited color palette of the rosettes foldout...) and that the painter was, overall, not very good at painting.

2) Or, as you suggest, a color annotation was copied from a source that had it. This would suggest a rather unquestioning following of an exemplar, which we presumably don't have anymore (or hasn't been digitized / linked to the Voynich yet).