f17r

[Skoove]

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.

I agree that the water stain is definitely complicating any confident intepretation of how it got there. That said, my understanding is that much of the paint and ink transfer within the VMS is from centuries of contact between the pages which I don't think is likely in this case.

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.

Also possible the page that caused this is one of the lost pages, although this would have had to happen before the folio numbers were added so I don't think it could have been one that was removed by Georg Baresch. This might also provide evidence that even more pages were in the original manuscript than we know of based on folio and quire numbers.  [b]Georg Bar[/b]
I also wonder what relevance this might have to Lisa's new theory of an unbound VMS?