10-03-2026, 08:39 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-03-2026, 08:40 AM by Jorge_Stolfi.)
(10-03-2026, 12:50 AM)R. Sale wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.@Jorge: FYI the Oresme investigation dates back to 2014. Not that recent, IMO.
Thanks! As you may know, I have been away from the Voynich scene for the last 20 years...
Quote:I have to object to your "Stupid Artist" Hypothesis. In the 'Oresme' version [BNF Fr. 565], the inverted T-O Earth is represented pictorially, and the lower half is water. Whereas, in the VMs the lower portion contains a word segment. Are you implying that the VMs artist did not recognize or know how to draw water??
The Artist surely did not make up everything. On any given page, the Author determined the important parts of the illustration, and the Artist only provided the decorative details. The Author's instructions may have been a verbal description of the figure, and/or a sketch, and/or illustrations from other books, with side notes on what to copy and what to change.
For f68v3, in particular, I suppose that the Author gave the Artist a sketch of the diagram with the eight spiral "roads" or "rivers", including the text to write on them; and the Oresme book, with instructions to copy that figure in the middle of the diagram and write those three words in the "T-O map" sectors. The sketch determined that four of the arms were to end at the cloud-band and four were to extend across it, all the way to the edge of the T-O map.
Or maybe the Author himself roughly copied the Oresme figure onto his sketch.
Unfortunately for him, at that point the Artist had no idea of what a cloud-band was and how it was supposed to be drawn. So instead he drew that bizarre "nebuly octagon" that made the starry sky look like it was cut out of a thick plate. Or a pool of water with the stars floating on it. Who knows what he thought of it...
All the best, --stolfi