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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Thanks for them images and clips!

The lines in the Book of Hours are much thinner and probably made with a different kind of tool.

I wonder what that could be.  

I suppose that in theory one can make a quill pen with arbitrarily fine trace.  It should be more fragile and should wear out faster, but if the payment is high enough...

Note that we are comparing VMS to an exquisite commissioned artwork performed by renowned artists probably using the best available tools and materials. This truly should be state of the art and the highest quality the money could get you.

Definitely.  

The original VMS Scribe was much below this caliber, and must not have had the same level of financial and professional motivation.  He did not even bother to keep the baselines straight. I would even guess that he had reasonable experience writing on paper, but not on vellum.  

First thing I noticed is how bad the paint work looks when zoomed in to the same scale as we use when examining the Voynich MS. Not as bad as in the Voynich MS, but still quite below what I would expect.

The human eye-brain uses only the lightness component of color to recognize shapes, including letter shapes and ornaments.  It records color proper with much lower spatial accuracy.  This fact has been exploited by some modern painters, by early color magazines and newspapers,  analog color TV, JPEG and MP4, ... If there are splashes of the right color at roughly the right place, the precise edges of the patch don't matter -- the eye will not see them, as long as there are strong light/dark edges (like an ink outline) with the correct shape.

However, the mismatches, gaps, unsteady curves are quite obvious at this scale and I don't think the artist(s) who made this Book of Hours would qualify for the retracing job in the Voynich MS.

Well, the smallest tendrils in the clips you posted are about as wide overall as a single stroke of the VMS clips.  To me, it looks like the Book of Hours artist had very good control of the pen, to less than 0.1 mm accuracy.  

Thus I think that he could definitely retrace the VMS original strokes so as to cover them completely, almost every time.

Note that, according to the MRT, the restoration Rt1 was commissioned by a later owner, who presumably had more resources than the original Author and thus could afford to hire a more skilled scribe (or scribal "factory").  Moreover, today the parts that were restored by Rt1 would be fainter than the parts that were not restored.  Thus,even if the Rt1 retraces were not quite perfect, and left a bit of Rt0 sticking out from the side, those defects would be very hard to spot today.

All the best, --stolfi