Davidsch,
You said
Quote:provenancing would assume that you know anything [something?] about the heritage of the images, the parchment or the text.
Yes, in a sense, although I'm not quite sure whether you are speaking about provenancing a particular piece of work, or provenancing an *image*.
They're rather different things. To provenance an object, you are effectively dating and placing the manufacture of a single item - and need only know enough to buy and sell the thing. Any picture of a woman and child could be correctly provenanced by saying it was painted in e.g. 15thC Italy. By reference to the substrate, pigments and glaze etc. (mostly these days by scientific non-invasive tests) you can check that it's not a fake. And then perhaps by the 'hand' name the atelier or painter who made it. But you are provencing that specific object's time and place of manufacture. Strictly speaking, you're not provenancing the image, but just the painting.
Provenancing the *image* would mean distinguishing this "a woman and child" as, say, a Christian religious icon, and since that idea takes different forms and carried different connotations in Byzantium as against Coptic Egypt, or Spain, or China, then regardless of who painted it, or where or when, the analyst aims to identify the context from which the informing image has come.
In reality, curators and keepers of books and art buyers do this within their area of specialization, to greater or lesser extent. It requires a great deal of reading and study of things other than pictures. But then when an image arrives which doesn't accord with anything in their own repertoire, regardless of where the particular picture was made, that's when they call in the iconographic analyst. Because what we do is reversible: we might say 'the style in which this picture of a bird is painted tells us that it came from an inner Asian textile, and the style of depiction is one that was popular in twelfth-century Persia, but by the fourteenth century, that fabric and its motifs was being copied by weavers in Lucca, and from them it began appearing first in frescos made in (say) Siena, and it was finally adopted by certain manuscript painters near Florence. So it isn't a native Italian or even a native Latin European form, but it is most likely to have been used by a painter who had trained in one of those centres - after which it became a fad in (say) England, because the English king married an Italian woman from Siena and set a new fashion and fad among the courtiers.
So then the provenancer knows where the 'curious' element comes from, and what it meant, and why it should turn up in a work made in fifteenth century Italy. The *image* isn't Italian, but Asian, and wasn't first enunciated in the fifteenth century but in about the seventh century and so on. The 'picture' however is, still, fifteenth century Italian.
And no matter how many examples one might then find in Italian, or in English manuscripts, the *image* remains Asian, not European, until inevitably it becomes mutated by the ways of seeing which apply in those Latin countries.
I think that the lack of background and training in this field has greatly hampered many Voynich researchers. It actually took me almost five years of explaining that the 'cloud band' pattern was Asian and could not be used as 'proof' of German cultural product, no matter how popular it later became in Germany. It was also necessary to point out that it was just as popular - and earlier - in France and other countries: because no-one had looked. The interesting thing is that though knowing themselves amateurs, people often think that imagery and its study is easy, and all you need to do it is look at pictures. I don't think, even after eight years, that Nick Pelling is quite willing, just yet, to abandon his belief that hatching is used in the Vms, or (supposing it were) that no-one except Italian renaissance graphic artists ever used hatching - but I live in hope!