29-08-2026, 09:53 PM
(29-08-2026, 01:49 PM)Bernd wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- created as loose sheets
- later binding with missing page numbers
- continuous amendments and revisions
These "features" are probably shared by the notebooks of all inventors and scientists. Why carry around a bound blank book to write notes that would later have to be amended, revised, and probably sorted by topic rather than by the time they were made?
By the way, I wonder how the Palatino 766 was bound. In an "industrially" produced book, one would expect the text and drawings be written on bifolios in the proper order, then folded and nested to form quires that would then be sewed together.
But from the images on that site it seems possible that the text and drawings were written on loose folios, not bifolios, and these were later pasted together to form bifolios for binding. Could that be the case?
There are a few figures that span two consecutive pages, and normally those would be on the bifolios at the center of their quires. However, some of those two-page figures are on pages that cannot be on the same bifolio. Like pages 29+30 and 31+32; or 15+16 and 17+18 and 19+20; or 45+46 and 47+48. Indeed, in some of the two-page figures the two halves do not seem to join properly (and the mismatch does not seem to be an artifact of them being scanned separately). As if they were drawn on two loose folios side by side, before these were bound into the book.
IIUC, the medium is paper, not vellum, and therefore the ink must be a tempera-like suspension of a brown pigment (sepia/ocher/siena/whatever) in water and binder. Apparently a dilute version of the same ink was used to paint some of the figures before their outlines were drawn on top. I wonder if the light translucent yellow paint on the VMS could have been the same: diluted ink, applied before drawing the outlines (unlike all the other color paints).
All the best, --stolfi