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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I recently took a deeper dive, and I saw this [...] Four separate flower stems emerge from the central stem near the top of the leaves. The four stems support a flower each , four flowers in total. [...] upper half of the flowers [...] know it existed though, as the text has been left blank in this area (or rather, written around the image).

I don't quite understand that drawing myself. 

In my view, most of the outline was retraced as part of a comprehensive restoration, after the original ink had faded to the point that many details and characters had become almost invisible, or worse.  (But if you have perused this thread you should know that some people dispute that conclusion.)  

In particular, I believe that a good part of that drawing was retraced during that restoration. The faint original traces are still visible here and there.

My guess is that the original drawing looked pretty much like what we see now.  The color paints are almost certainly even later, so we should try to ignore them.  Indeed it is possible that the blue paint washed away some parts of the drawing, such as the outlines of the individual "forks" in the foreground, causing them to merge into one single thing with four stems and 12 hooked fingers.  

I believe that the big white dome is original, and so are the 10 or 11 hooked fingers in the background.  The dots on the dome may have been added by the Restorer, on his own, since I don't see trace of original ink under them.

It is indeed puzzling why we don't see the stalks of the background fingers.  There is no trace of them, so it is not like they faded away.  

One explanation is that the Artist simply forgot to draw them. 

Another possibility is that the Artist imagined the flower as a cone with prominent ribs, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  Then those stalks would be the ribs, and only the foreground ones would be visible.

The bases of the stalks seem incompatible with this view, since one of them is shown to start behind two of the others (which itself is weird).  However, that part of the drawing was retraced.  So it is quite possible that originally the six "inner" traces of those stalks (excluding the two outer ones that define the outline of the whole flower) stopped before they came together at the base.  Then the Restorer mis-interpreted those ribs as stalks, and "restored" them by extending them down until they joined.

All the best, --stolfi