[split] Taccola spillover thread

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I disagree. They are failed copies.

the MS that contains book III and IV of De ingeneis is Pal 766. This is an autograph by Taccola, made 1432–1433 and intended as a dedication to the Emperor upon his visit to Siena. It is unclear whether a separate copy was given to the Emperor.

Pal 766 looks to neat to be the original notebook.  It must be a "clean copy" of it.  Could be the one made for the Emperor, or a second copy for the Siena honchos.   

By Wikipedia, Taccola was born 1382 and died c. 1453, aged 71.  So Pal 766 was inked when he was about 50.  His real notebooks must have been created over a long period of time, probaby starting around 1400.  

Thus there must have been other copies of the original notebooks, made anywhere between 1400 and 1432.  Once a copy was made, thousands more could be made from it.  Indeed, Taccola's international fame could only have been due to the circulation of copies of those notebooks. 

Maybe that Keyser(?) manuscript that others have mentioned is such an early (copy of)^n copy of (some of) Taccola's original notebooks?

Anyway , it seems quite possible that the VMS Author, somewhere in Switzerland or Germany, even as early as 1420, would have owned a copy of one of his notebboks .  Specifically, the one with the illustration of the simple arch siphon bridge (labeled B by Koen) -- which just must have been the "Inspiration" for the "rainbow" on f75r.

And don't forget that the C14 date is only a lower bound for the date of the inking of the Voynich manuscript.

I don't want to go through every Taccola MS to find the source of the drawbridge image, but it is clear that [Rafal's image at lower right is about] a separate engineering problem. In the text under the drawing, you can see that it says "castellum cum ponte levatorio", "castle with a drawbridge".

Sorry, I am confused about the relation of those images.   Let C and D be the two images below your A and B, respectively.

Your image A and the image C below are "identical" in the sense that they are photos of the same page from the same manuscript, correct?  Not just "identical" in the sense of a good copy.

Note that the mountains in the background of image D (Rafal's) are way too similar those of your image A.  And the wavy cliff in the background of D looks like a manged version of the river flowing horizontally across the background of A (the source of potable water).  And then the incongruous leafy branch growing out of the river's margin in D must be a mangled version of the creek in A that leads from the sluice gate at left to the siphon's feed pool.

So I would say that D is a copy of Taccola's "drawbridge" figure, which must have been made by an artist who "borrowed" the background details from B or some other copy of Taccola's "siphon bridge" figure, without understanding them.  Would you agree?

All the best, --stolfi