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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

"Aesthetics would be reason enough for why he decided to fix those small q heads.

Actually, it's the other way around. At least in other books. Appearance before correction.

I don't get the point here.  Those examples you showed are palimpsests, where vellum got reused by scraping off the old writing.  Obviously for those people, on those occasions, the money saved justified the extra work and the "dirty" look of the result.

Ink never disappears completely; you would see it under UV light.

  

Well, that of course was not a worry of whoever wrote those palimpsests...

But what does that have to do with those corrections on those qs?

According to you, the retracer worked very carefully, but he just can't get a ‘4’ right.

Yes, but his work was far from 100.00% perfect.  On every page there are bits of faded old ink that he did not retrace, or that he retraced wrong.  Especially on the drawings, where obviously there was no need for high accuracy. 

But one cannot see those defects if one starts from the certainty that the restoration would have been impossible...

I still doubt that the size of the head of the q is significant. If that was the case, there should be a clear dichotomy between head sizes, with a substantial number of instances of the two variants.  But how many small-head qs are there in the VMS?

Why didn't he trace or describe the drawings in the folds? Take the rosette leaf, for example. It really needed it.

My current guess is that the Rt1 restoration happened at least a century after the book was written (or maybe less, if the original ink was particularly bad) but before the book was sent to Kircher.   And the "Boobs Retracer" Rt2 did his thing after Rt1 and before Kircher too.

Thus, the Rt1 restoration was no later than 1600.  And it apparently used an ink formula similar to the original one -- that is, not iron-gall. (Whereas Rt2 seems to have used proper iron-gall ink.) 

And therefore the Rt1 restoration itself has faded, especially near folds and edges; and it was washed off by overpainting or by any spills of water (like on f116v) or "ketchup" (like on f103r).

And yes, it's a similar technique to that used by the Templars, only the characteristic is different.

Steganography is such a simple idea that It must have been invented independently many time before it became a "widely known" technique in the 1500s or so.  You say that the Templars used it?

The VMS Author could have invented it too.  But that claim needs more evidence to become credible...

Think of entropy and five scribes. Do five scribes really have the same writing tolerance?

  

Indeed, it is remarkable that all five scribes are sloppy to the same extent and in the same ways.  Not just on character shapes, but sloppy also with curved and unevenly spaced baselines, crooked text margins,  drawings that run into folds and page edges, radial lines that don't go through the center...

Seriously, that is one of the reasons why I don't believe in the "five scribes" theory at all.

All the best, --stolfi