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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

If these were isolated cases, one could still discuss it. But it is the high number of overwritings that makes it implausible, because it is no longer comprehensible.

But the claim is precisely that the first round of rewriting was not just a few touch-ups here and there, but a global restoration enterprise.  

The claim is that, a century or two after the VMS was created, its owner did what the owner of a badly degraded valuable painting would do.   Namely, he handed over the book to a scribe, with the task of bringing the book back as close as possible to the original state.   The scribe may even have been one who specialized in such restoration work.  That goal implied matching the ink in color and appearance, and tracing over all the original traces that had significantly faded, as closely as possible.  

But the work could not be perfect.  Some parts had already been irremediably lost.  The new scribe (unlike the original one) did not know the alphabet not the "morphology" of the words, and thus could not tell whether a partly faded glyph was a q or an y or and l or some new weirdo.  Many Ih and eiin may be the outcome of that confusion.  And even if the scribe was hired for six months,  the time he could spend on any page was limited.

I understand that people may be very reluctant to accept this claim.  But can it be denied?  Please check my previous post. Can you deny points 1-4?  Could they have not triggered such a global restoration?

Unfortunately, matching the original ink meant that the restored text and drawings were themselves vulnerable to wear, humidity,  insects, spills, etc.  And the parts that the first Retracer skipped, because they were still good enough, continued to fade away.  

So eventually there were other more limited "restoration" rounds -- but clearly not as skillful and careful as the first one.  On some pages these later Retracers had fun embellishing the drawings, adding breasts and hats to the nymphs, more fantastic details to the plants.  And then there was the Dark Painter...

All the best, --jorge