The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[proto57]

There are some sliders that are being tuned up or down depending on the argument that's being made.

One is the slider of "how naturalistic are the drawings?". When it concerns features the creature shares with armadillos but not pangolins, this slider goes way up. When it concerns features it doesn't share with armadillos, the slider goes to zero.

The other slider is "how competent of a forger is Wilfrid Voynich?" Which implicitly bounces between "world's greatest genius" and "buffon".

Well I've made this argument, too, Koen, but in the opposite direction. I have always tried, and if I may say so, been somewhat successful, in applying a fairly even standard to all of my interpretations, and in filter those of others.

On the contrary, I have heard numerous arguments which reject good comparisons for bad ones, based solely on the C14 results... when they should not be. And, this is not my imagination, it is admitted when I am told "1420 Genuine is the baseline". That is, at the same time, admitting filtering opinions thought that bias... and gives rise to rejecting, for instance, the armadillo, for other animals which, point for point are worse candidates, because they would be "too new" for their paradigm.

No, there is no filter on Modern Forgery, it only looks at the best comparisons out there, and needs to reject no pre-1912 comparison.

And I have had people say... for instance, in this case, but in many others... the artist was both "too good" and "too bad" to have meant an armadillo! And, believe it or not, from the same person! That is, I was actually told that (paraphrasing) "If the person meant to draw an armadillo, they would have done a better job, and it would look more like one", then, in the same discussion, "The artist was so bad that we can't know what they were drawing here, it could be anything, and just happens to resemble an armadillo, by accident". You see? They were both "too good" and "too bad" to have meant an armadillo, when all I propose is they were just right to draw what it looks most like: An Armadillo.

No, I feel the artist was consistently "that bad", and no better, and in that range of "slider setting" they are quite consistent. I do not need to alter my standards to fit this identification, then change them to fit another. All my identifications fall well within the level of ability I believe was at play here. And also, it coincidentally (!!!) matches the ability and style of the one bit of "art" we know Voynich drew... his Sessa logo: