f17r

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I was looking through the multispectral images of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (looking at the maginalia actually) but then I noticed this in the top right hand corner of the page.

It looks like a case of "offset printing" or "offsetting", which when moist paint or ink from on page gets tranferred by contact to the facing page.

Cases of offsetting are very common in the VMS.  They are usually caused by a specific dark blue paint.  It seems to be a mixture of royal blue paint (which seems to be based on azurite, a common copper pigment) and some other  dark gray ingredient that does not dry well and collects along the edges of the painted area.  Usually the offset print has only this dark gray component.

But this case seems to be different, because some of the blue pigment got transferred as well, and the lines look more like ordinary brown ink than the bad gray component above.  But "stepping back" and looking at that area at 100% magnifcation or less,  one can see that this print lies precisely inside a water stain (which is more visible in the UV images).

So it seems that spilled water softened the ink and blue paint on a page that was originally in contact with f17r, and some of that ink and paint "offsetted" onto f17r.

It isn't caused by its neighbouring pages since there are no structures like this on either 17v or 16v.

Indeed I cannot find a source that matches this offset print.  It could be a folio that was lost, or a scratch drawing that was not included in the final set.  

We actually do not know how many pages were in the VMS when it was written.  The folio and quire numbers were written when the bifolios were bound.  We can see that they were arranged in the wrong order, thus the binding and numbering must have happened when the Author was no longer around. 

It seems possible that the water damage that left the stains we see today (which must have happened much after the original scribing, too) damaged some folios so much that they had to be discarded before the rest were numbered and bound.

All the best, --stolfi