Flag Finials

[-JKP-]

Do you think we are looking for specific castles and towers or might it just show a certain architectural style?

I think that the illustrations in the Voynich manuscript are too sketchy to allow for the identification of specific buildings. I am also not sure that they are meant to portray actual buildings: they might as well be allegorical, in my opinion.

Have you played the game Pictionary? I was playing it with some of my friends at a party some years ago and one of the players drew a line going straight up off the page and his partner immediately said "Empire State Building" (which was the correct answer).

If someone after that were to draw a line with an oval on top, I'm pretty sure his or her partner would immediately guess "Space Needle" since they live in that area and everyone there knows the Space Needle.

Sometimes if something is familiar and iconic, it takes very little information to recognize it. My feeling is that the castle and crenelation drawings in the VMS have enough detail that someone familiar with a particular route might recognize them, that they might be landmarks.



If the main road from A to B passes through the Alsace or Bavaria, one would see saddleback flags, if it then passed through Lombardy heading south, one would see Ghibelline merlons, if one then passed by Rome, one might see the leaning tower of Pisa sinking into the ground, and if one ended up in Naples or Salerno, one would be in a volcanically active area. I'm not saying this is the route necessarily expressed in the VMS rosettes page (if it's a map, then it's hard to determine scale), but symbols along those lines are certainly possible and might be recognizable to someone of the time.