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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

As for that Basel manuscript, my explanation for those ink density variations is that the scribe wrote an entire page (or chapter, or book) with a lighter ink and a sharp pen that left a thin trace everywhere.  ... Then, after checking for errors, the same scribe went back with a broader pen and darker ink, and retraced all the text.

A variant of that explanation that may make even more sense:  the first pass, in light ink and fine pen, was written by a senior scribe who was fluent in Latin and knew all the scribal abbreviations and other tricks of the trade.  Because of his skill, his time was valuable, so he wrote as fast as he could while keeping letter size shape spacing etc good enough.  Then, presumably after some proofreading, a junior scribe was tasked with retracing the text with a broader pen and darker ink.  He did not have to know Latin or what the abbrevs meant, and could do it as slowly as he needed to.

And then I believe that another scribe went through his work, and fixed a few letters here and there, that the junior scribe had mis-traced.  This accounts for the scattered letters in even darker ink.

But I don't think that either scenario (two passes by the same scribe, or by a senior/junior team) applies to the VMS.  For one thing, the Rt0 (original) traces of the VMS are not just written with lighter ink, they are faded to a variable degree, all the way to invisible. Also, the VMS Rt1 (restoration) scribe did not retrace every broad stroke, as in the Basel example, but left many original strokes, glyphs, and words without retracing -- presumably because they were still legible at the time.

By the way, the Basel manuscript is in paper, not vellum.  That may make a difference: places that are traced twice with the same pen and ink -- like when traces cross, or are retraced within a short time -- tend to get darker on paper, because the ink penetrates the fibers.  Not so on vellum.

All the best, --stolfi