02-10-2026, 01:24 PM
(02-10-2026, 11:25 AM)Koen G wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Maybe this is an indication that artists with relatively low skill trend towards similar techniques?They didn't just trend---they were enculturated to them, and there was a market rewarding efficiency and consistency! Not for nothing, the brow-to-nose stroke looks like the kind of letterform a scribe would be expected to execute consistently and confidently, and that is absolutely something that would get passed around. (This kind of penmanship-art connection is cross-culturally common; East Asian art consciously uses the same brush strokes as calligraphy, and I'm given to understand the qalam and its techniques enjoys in a similar synergy in the Muslim world.) It would be an over-correction to call the art in the Voynich good, but there is a good deal of craftsmanship on display because there is a consistency in form and technique through the Zodiac section that comes from experience, knowledge, and intentionality. Which is to say that placing faces like these in a place in the early 1400s would very probably tell us something about the artist's milieu.
Interestingly, the work in question looks like it is in Greek, which has been posited as an influence on the script more than once