No text, but a visual code

[Antonio García Jiménez]

To understand the Rosettes, it is necessary to know how the universe was conceived in the Middle Ages. I will focus on the outer sphere of the medieval cosmos, that of the fixed stars. For medieval thinkers, the fixed stars were embedded in the sphere, and there were no dark spaces. If they looked at the sky and saw a dark area, they assumed the light from those stars was too faint to be seen.

The central rosette represents the sphere of the fixed stars. We see that blue, scallop-shaped band, which is the iconographic device most commonly used to mark the cosmic boundary. We see tubes emerging around the outer circle, and next to them, bumps with black dots representing the openings of other tubes. The artist is attempting to simulate the sphere using additional, overlapping bumps. For the author, the stars were inside those tubes, and their light or astrological influence emanated from there.

Apart from the outer circle, there are two other inner circles in the central rosette. There are also bumps with black dots, representing tubes drawn in a flattened style. The entire design aims to convey the idea of ​​a three-dimensional sphere completely covered in tube openings.

The author wanted to leave space on the surface to draw the luxurious vessels covered in asterisk-shaped stars. The message is that the contents of those vessels—which also appear in the pharmaceutical section of the Voynich manuscript—are something distilled in the sphere of the fixed stars. This is common astrological thought in the Middle Ages.