No text, but a visual code

[Antonio García Jiménez]

The "Rosettes" foldout is a representation or map of the medieval cosmos. Instead of placing the circles one inside another, as most medieval manuscripts do, the author of the Voynich presents them unfolded. He does this because he wants to show the connection between them all, and above all, he wishes to highlight the sphere of the fixed stars at the center—where essences are created—which explains the presence of the ornate vessels also seen in the pharmaceutical section.

   We see the sphere of the Earth in the upper right, with a castle inside and walls and buildings extending outwards. We see the walls extending down into the abyss, and buildings clinging as if to a cliff, stacked one above the other. What the author does is use a radial projection to simulate the Earth's curvature. This extreme curvature creates that sheer, vertical drop.

   We can also see an example of this in a 15th-century French manuscript of the work De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus. It is a T-O map in which we see buildings rising vertically from their base along the curvature of the Earth, creating an effect similar to that seen in the design of the Rosettes.

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