Assumptions baked into the VMS carbon dating

[Jorge_Stolfi]

No objections to that for the Balneo section.  But is there any plausible Taccola influence on Astro/Cosmo, which contains f68?

Yes,  the foldout VM f70r2 vs. Taccola's star-sun with face and pipes from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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Indeed, if Taccola was a source for Bio, it would be a plausible source for the sun image in that diagram as well. 

It would be another case of the Artist misinterpreting what he was copying.  The 8-lobed blue star has been described as a "flower".  But the "nervures" on the "petals" now suggest that it could be a crown of rays, like in the Taccola drawing.

However, I don't think that Taccola was the first "artist" in many centuries to think of depicting a sun with a face and a halo of rays like that. So it is possible that both figures were copied from earlier originals.  

Note that the VMS version has a crown of "flames" around the face, some of which extend into the "pipes"; and it also has "pipes" extending from the tips of the "petals", as well as from the gaps between them.  Did the Artist provide those details on his own? Or was he copying from some other figure?

I remember the assumption (from Lisa ?) That the ink was applied on relatively fresh parchment, but I don't know what this claim is based on. I wouldn't rule out old parchment but I don't know about the effects of age on ink or color retention.

I don't recall any such statements, and it seems highly unlikely.  At a minimum, a few months must have elapsed between the vellum being made and the Author acquiring it.  The scribing of the whole VMS must have taken many more months.   So "fresh" would have been several months at least.  Would there be a noticeable difference between writing on 6-months-old vellum and 60-years-old one?

And I don't see what physical-chemical process could allow one to determine that detail by looking at a 600-year-old manuscript.  

Why is it less likely that someone would source the same quality parchment years later?

Because I would assume bad parchment contains more information which varies by creation process than high-quality parchment which is just uniform. Meaning 2 sources of bad parchment should exhibit larger differences that 2 sources of perfect parchment.

AFAIK the vellum-making process was quite standard, because consumers and dealers must have wanted minimally consistent quality across manufacturers. A 400 page manuscript has 100 bifolios; it seems very unlikely that one would be able to source them all from the same maker.  

On the other hand, the VMS folios are all of bad quality, but are all different in size, edge finish, holes, creases, even surface finish. I bet that each bifolio could have been made in a different year and a different town in Europe -- and we would not be able to tell that now.

All the best, --stolfi