The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

There is nothing there

Agreed. Whatever was written there, besides the oror sheey, is completely lost.  It is essentially invisible, even in the UV image, or covered by the "restored" traces.

the rest is German.

The rest is some Latin letters and incomprehensible glyphs.  One must strain to read some of the letters
as a couple of German-like words. Whoever tried to restore the lost writing was probably a German speaker, or though that the text was in German for some reason.  But he clearly could not make out a sentence that made any sense.

Even if I deliberately try to clean the parchment by any means possible, it always remains visible

That is a property of iron-gall ink, and that is why "anyone" who bothered to write anything on vellum would use iron-gall ink. 

But the ink of the VMS is not iron-gall ink.  That is established by the way it fades between near and far infrared images, and by how easily it is damaged by spills and paint-over elsewhere.  

The above facts are consistent with the "ink" being a runny solid pigment suspension paint, like tempera or watercolor; consisting of sienna, the most common brown pigment, and a binder like gum arabic.  That kind of ink does not penetrate the vellum, and the pigment does not bind to it;  it is only glued to it by the binder.  If the water spill was left over the ink for more than a few seconds, it would have softened the binder; and then wiping the spill off could well have erased the writing almost completely.

By the way, the red ink on Medieval manuscripts must have been a solid pigment suspension ink too, with minion or cinnabar as pigment.  So I predict that it is much more easily damaged by water than the "black" iron-gall ink.

All the best, --stolfi