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

[oshfdk]

But, first, there are many cases of darker glyphs in the middle of lighter text.  You would consider them "backtracing", cases of the original Scribe himself going back and retracing glyphs that he had just written; and I can agree that many of them are just that.  But they show that it is quite possible to retrace many glyphs without leaving "unequivocal evidence" other than the darker ink...

1) Retouching fresh wet ink is totally different, because wet inks will mix by themselves. In some cases you don't even need to follow any stroke at all - you can just touch any part of the existing stroke with a tip of the quill and the new ink will fill the existing stroke with new shade. Or if you do make a new stroke, the inks from the new and the old stroke will mix leaving no clear traces of double strokes, just a single somewhat wider stroke.

2) In many cases I usually don't consider dark patches of ink as a sign of retracing. As I said before, I consider most variation of the ink density to be the actual variation of the density of the ink, something like oily/gooey blobs of dark ink suspended in relatively transparent ink.

About the example with c and h that @nablator has provided, the dark strokes were not added immediately, you can clearly see a sharp border between the dark and the faint horizontal bar, the inks didn't mix there. This is what proper retracing looks like. However, the left e part is quite wide and could have plausibly covered the original stroke entirely. This is not impossible at all, I'm not arguing that there should be a double stroke each time anything is retraced. I'm arguing that there should be plenty of these obvious double strokes. Like in this example: for two strokes one perfectly hides the original*, the other almost doesn't hide the original at all.

*unless the original was just a h, but I don't think I'm ready for this discussion now, and it's not really important here.

And, second, there are in fact thousands of cases where the Rt1 Retracer left evidence of his work. Like bits of Rt0 traces poking out under his traces,

If you mean like clearly obviously poking, I'd like to see them. If you mean like faint parallel lines perfectly mimicking the shape of the main stroke, these could be:

1) image compression/processing artifacts
2) small part of the original ink that managed to seep into the vellum and reacted with it under the surface
3) lens/matrix artifacts
4) the side of the nib of the quill touching some bumps on the vellum
5) for poorly mixed ink with dark blobs - just the center of the stroke executed with a blob that sticks to the middle of the quill and the side filled with weak free flowing ink.

For a stroke to be obviously a different trace poking from under a later trace it should obviously differ in shape and not be perfectly parallel/offset copy of the new stroke.

 plumes retraced in the wrong direction and therefore with wrong width, glyphs turned into weirdos, double traces in illustrations that make no sense, ... 

I think by now you know my answer to this one, but I don't mind repeating: I don't consider appeals to "wrong" glyphs, shapes or traces valid until we have some means of knowing the intention of the original work. It's clear that this manuscript is unusual, no matter retraced or not, putting an arbitrary line where its original weirdness should stop and some extraneous weirdness starts does not work like a good argument for me.

Note that I think [@nablator's] example proves my point. The scribe there redid full complete strokes, even putting another horizontal bar on top of the existing bar.

But the ligature is normally part of the h, not of the C...

This doesn't seem to matter here, I have no strong opinion about the origin of this particular feature, I don't mind it being a work of a later retracer or the original scribe. My point is that whoever did this obvious overwriting, used full natural complete strokes and not straight dash lines that your interpretation suggests in the gallows above. And yes, this clearly looks like something written over the original text some time after the original text was done, with at least enough time passing for the original ink to properly dry out.