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

[oshfdk]

And then there is also the fact that, on almost every page, one can find text and parts of figure outlines that have faded to near invisibility.  How do you explain that other text or outlines on the same page, right next to those cases, is still dark and sharp?   A batch of defective ink could be the explanation if it happened on only a few pages.  But not on practically every one...

It's not hard to invent a possible explanation for the ink that would for me personally require much less suspension of disbelief than a team of what appears like simultaneously superhumanly precise and superhumanly sloppy retracers.

For example, it's clear that the original designers of the manuscript were ok with experimenting. The foldouts, the custom script, strange imagery, no matter what the motivation was for all this, clearly they were acting outside of the norms of the mainstream herbal manuscripts. Why couldn't they consider experimenting with the inks too? Suppose for some artistic or practical effect they decided to try mixing iron gall and ochre inks. They matched the shade nearly perfectly, but what they didn't realize was that these two inks won't mix and the iron gall part was left as a suspension of tiny blobs within the ochre ink. When they initially penned the manuscript, two shades being close enough, this looked good and maybe even cool and mother-of-pearly and magical due to slight variations of the hues. They loved the aesthetic and they kept this ink for the whole of the manuscript. However, in a few hundred years the ochre part faded away while the iron gall part got even darker, leaving the mess we see today.

I see no particular problems with this explanation, at least it looks internally consistent. I'm not sure if it's physically possible with the specific inks I mentioned, but I think there certainly should be some combination of pigments and binders that would create the situation above. On the other hand, the retracers so professional that their work appears to be undetectable to practically anyone but you, but at the same time very sloppy and making a lot of stupid mistakes is harder to believe for me.

BTW, one other possible test: if there exists in the manuscript a clear offset of the text. I would say that if the variation of the darkness of the offset appears to match that of the text, this is a strong argument that all variations of the shades were put to the vellum at the same time. Otherwise we should presuppose several perfectly aligned offsets of the same folio somehow produced in different decades or centuries.