The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The McCrone chemical analysis from 2009 is often referred to as additional hard evidence. But it actual contributes basically nothing.  ... But it also didn't provide evidence that narrowed the materials back to the 15th century -- what it found was consistent with the time period including that century and several centuries after that (and consistent with what a potential late-era forger could have used for that matter.)

Yes.  Slightly correcting my previous summary of that report:

• The 20 minuscule samples that we collected must contain an unknown large number of non-crystalline substances (including possibly iron-gall ink) that our instruments are unable to detect or identify.  We did identify and approximately quantify the elements that each sample contained, but we could not identify the non-crystalline compounds, if any, that comprised those elements.  In particular, we can tell that the green paint contains copper, and the brown text ink contains iron and titanium, but neither of them in a crystalline form, so we have no idea of what those copper, iron, and titanium compounds are.  But we did find some crystalline substances in some samples, which we could in principle identify. In some of these, the structure of those crystals matched mineral pigments used at the time, such as azurite (blue). In others, out software said that the best matches to the crystal structure were some exotic minerals, such as palmierite, that were never used as pigments (including today) and cannot even be contamination from the environment.  We cannot explain those matches, but we don't dare question the software's output, even though you can see in the attached figures that the spectra are quite noisy.
  

PS. However, let me say that I do not think it is likely that the VMS is a modern forgery, or even an ancient one.  But I believe that there is plenty of internal evidence that (1) the color paints are not original and were probably applied many decades or centuries after the manuscript left the Author, and (2) the text and drawings were extensively restored, retouched, and even incremented at various times in the last 600 years.