No text, but a visual code

[Jorge_Stolfi]

You claim the painter didn't understand the drawings. You say this as if you did, which I doubt because you have a very poor opinion of the Voynich imagery.

Well, yes, I do have a very low opinion of the Scribe's artistic abilities.  Not because I understand the drawings (which I mostly don't) but by seeing how he could not even divide a circle into four equal parts, or how his nymph drawings improved (or failed to) as he got more experience drawing them.

It seems logical that if the paint had been applied by a later owner, they would have done so with more care.

That is assuming that later owners would have had the same reverence for the book that we have now.  Or that Baresch had.  I still suspect that the Painter was a pre-adolescent child who was allowed to use it as coloring book. 

Whether that was the case or not, I think it is likely that some later owner (probably not the Jesuits or Wilfrid) decided to have the book painted to increase its sale value -- since it would be competing in the "market" against other fantastic herbals, like the Alchemists' Herbal, which were all painted.

Furthermore, in many of the female figures in pools, the lower legs and feet have not been drawn, suggesting that the author already intended to apply colors later to give the impression that those parts of the anatomy were hidden.

If a nymph was meant to be standing or sitting in the water, he would not have drawn her legs and feet anyway, irrespective of whether the water was meant to be painted or not.  So that detail is not evidence that the illustrations were meant to be painted.

In fact, there are many examples throughout the book where the paint obscured or erased important details of the drawing.  Including the lower legs or feet of some nymphs.

On the SW corner of f79r, for example, the nymph was apparently meant to be standing or sitting, not in a pool but under a waterfall, leaning against a back rest supported by two vertical poles.  The Painter painted over her leg and feet, one of the poles, and erased the lower part of the waterfall.   He may have erased also some other stuff inside the "pool", to the right of the nymph's legs.

On the facing page f78v, the Painter painted with green the portholes on the wall of the big tub.  But those can only have been openings into a space below the floor of the tub, where fire would be lit to heat the water (as in a japanese ofurō).  Thus their color should have been orange, red, or yellow, or black -- not green.

And then there is the "noise" created by the BEEP sorry...

All the best, --stolfi