RE: green water
Diane > 13-03-2018, 06:21 PM
Just a general caution about looking and 'ways of seeing'.
When we look at something we don't understand - don't recognise as familiar - the instinctive response is either (i) to hunt for something which does seem familiar, and ignore the rest as details that "don't really matter" OR (ii) to pick one detail we recognise and use that as a basis from which to interpret every other detail.
Neither is a very useful way to provenance imagery, even though these are both universal habits in human beings. (i) is why we can so easily recognise a familiar face in a large crowd and (ii) is how we manage to re-orient ourselves when we're lost in a forest... among other situations.
But when we're talking about how to provenance and read imagery as problematic as the Vms'. these are counter-productive. With (i) if you don't read the whole of the image and all its details, you'll miss important information and likely get the thing quite wrong. (ii) because if you interpret the basic detail wrongly you get all that follows quite wrong, though quite consistent. As example, the habit had always been to interpret a detail on f. 79v as a 'cross' and there was a fully-developed explanation for that detail complete with rays of light from heaven, and saints (supposedly naked) holding crosses and so on. I had to point out, and then brave the storm of protest, when I first said that not only was that detail not a cross, but there was no evidence of Christian culture in the manuscript's imagery, bar a few obviously late additions such as the cross put on one of the 'three crowns'.
It's one thing to offer a context in which a Vms picture seems to fit, culturally and historically, but it's very easy to slip into a state of mind where you're not actually explaining why the pictures are as they are but excusing them for not being exactly what you imagine they should be, and what you firmly believe they *would be* if they better reflected the story you've invented for them and believe very deeply must one day be proved true.
There's no need to explain away the Voynich palette by inventing dramas of scarcity in the atelier. If there's red in the manuscript then pink was a possibility. If there's red and blue, purple-to-black is a possibility. If nothing in the pink-purple-black has been used (allowing for the effects of time), either it can't be explained or it needs a more reasonable explanation than hypothetical shortages of pink pigment.
A better approach - for those who simply cannot accept a non-Latin and non-Mediterranean history for the manuscript's content - would be to test the 'shortage in the atelier' storyline by commissioning from a professional company such as McCrone a full, non-destructive test and description of the whole range of pigments in the Vms. McCrone's long experience might well allow them to identify most of the pigments' materials on sight, and to test the rest without destroying anything.
We have the technology.