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The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

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• The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

• The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 03:53 PM

  The McCrone report stated on page 3 "In all probability", the inks used for text and drawing were iron gall inks."  
  
  But that is not correct.  The instruments described in the report cannot positively identify iron-gall ink (IGI).  The X-ray diffraction spectrum can identify particles of crystalline mineral pigments, like azurite, minium, hematite.  For substances that are not crystalline -- which is the case of IGI -- they can only tell which chemical elements they contain, but not the substances -- how those elements are combined. 
  
  Those instruments only determined that the ink contains iron.  It was natural to conclude that it was IGI, because 99.99% of the iron-containing dark ink on vellum documents and manuscripts is IGI, and it does not make sense to write on vellum with any other black ink.  People would use vellum when they wanted the document or book to last for centuries, and resist rubbing, humidity, spills; and to make the text relatively tamper-proof. Only IGI would achieve that goal.
  
  But, unfortunately, the VMS is not a "99.99% manuscript".  It is a "0.01%" one.  And that has led too many experts astray...
  
  In particular the VMS text ink is definitely not IGI. 
  
  For one thing, unlike IGI, the VMS ink will come off easily and completely with water.  That is clearly visible on the ultraviolet images of f116v, or inside the "ketchup" stain of f103r.  In fact it seems to come off even just by rubbing.  
  
  But the real evidence is how it looks under infrared.  According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
  
  

  Quote:According to recent reflectance measurements, iron gall inks absorb IR radiation up to 1200 nm [23] (p. 58) (Additional file 1: Suppl 2),Footnote3 while ochre already become transparent at 850 nm [25] (p. 16). An iron gall ink underdrawing could be thus determined, if the underdrawing lines absorb radiation up to 1200 nm and become invisible in higher wavelengths

  
  And here are clips from the infrared images of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. under light of various wavelengths:
  
  650 nm (red):
     
  
  700 nm (infrared):
       
  
  940 nm (infrared):
     
  
  Thus the text ink on that page becomes transparent and invisible between 700 and 940 nm.  It is not IGI, but probably some iron-containing brown mineral pigment like sienna.  
  
  The report itself admits that the quire numbers (Sample 19) did not show significant iron contents.   Which is not strange: quire numbers, unlike the folio numbers, were only temporary instructions to the bookbinder; and thus were probably made with some other ink, like lampblack (india) ink -- with is much easier to make than IGI, lasts indefinitely in a closed bottle, and is better than IGI for writing on paper.
  
  Another common mis-interpretation of that report is the claim that they determined that all inks and pigments were original from the 1400s. 
  
  First, as the report admits, they failed to identify many of the pigments, including the text ink and the green paint that is used on the leaves of most of the plants. (They only determined that it contained copper but was not crystalline, and guessed that it could be some unidentified organic salt of copper.)  And they mis-identified others, like a red pigment as "palmierite" (which is an extremely rare colorless mineral, found only around fumaroles in volcanic areas.)
  
  And, for those paints that they did identify, they did not not determine any dates.
  
  All they found is that the pigments that they did identify, like azurite (but not that "palmierite") were available and used in the 1400s.  That is, none of the pigments that they could identify was a synthetic pigment that became available only after 1700 (like the titanium white that debunked the Vinland Map).  
  
  But all those pigments that they did identify are still available today, and would have been used by a painter or forger at any time before 1911...
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  eggyk > Yesterday, 04:04 PM

  Do you have source for those UV images of f17r? Are the full pages, or other pages, available somewhere? I would really appreciate them if possible!
  
  

  (Yesterday, 03:53 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Another common mis-interpretation of that report is the claim that they determined that all inks and pigments were original from the 1400s. 
  
  First, as the report admits, they failed to identify many of the pigments, including the text ink and the green paint that is used on the leaves of most of the plants. (They only determined that it contained copper but was not crystalline, and guessed that it could be some unidentified organic salt of copper.)  And they mis-identified others, like a red pigment as "palmierite" (which is an extremely rare colorless mineral, found only around fumaroles in volcanic areas.)
  
  And, for those paints that they did identify, they did not not determine any dates.

  
  
  I posted something similar on the thread for the zoom conference where the ink was discussed. At that time it was about the term "period appropriate", while you use "original from the 1400s", but they are effectively the same mistaken interpretation. I repeat it here, as I believe that it continues to be important:
  
  
  

  (14-03-2026, 12:44 AM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Except when people claim that the VMS has "period appropriate" ink, which is technically true, it can end up being slightly misleading.
  
  As a non-expert, hearing that term makes me think "appropriate to the 15th century specifically", not "appropriate to every century" or "appropriate to every century before the 20th". Maybe experts in this field have always known this, but I definitely didn't, and i'm sure many others don't either. 

  
  
  Now, about the reflectivity/absorption of iron-gall inks, I do wonder if this is influenced by the thickness of the ink, the composition of the ink, and the amount of time the ink has been exposed to the elements. The paper you linked appears to be discussing iron-gall ink that is hidden under paint, and is thus not exposed to the atmosphere. Ink that may have oxidised/reacted over centuries may have different absorptive properties to "fresh" iron-gall ink.
  
  (copied my response from previous thread)

• RE: The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  nablator > Yesterday, 04:48 PM

  (Yesterday, 04:04 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have source for those UV images of f17r? Are the full pages, or other pages, available somewhere? I would really appreciate them if possible!

  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

• RE: The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  eggyk > Yesterday, 05:09 PM

  (Yesterday, 04:48 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  
  I don't know how I keep missing these.. I seem to have downloaded everything there except these, maybe because they look like plain black images at first glance 
  
  I assume the images in this thread have had the exposure ramped up, then. Thank you.

• RE: The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  R. Sale > Yesterday, 06:44 PM

  Perhaps the McCrone statement is a bit too oracular. I interpret it as saying that nothing was found in the ink that would contradict the C-14 parchment dating, but that doesn't much limit or indicate the type of ink that was used.
  
  There are pages in the VMs Zodiac etc. where subsequent enhancements were drawn in a significantly darker ink. Is that a different 'type' of ink?

• RE: The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 06:58 PM

  (Yesterday, 04:04 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have source for those UV images of f17r? Are the full pages, or other pages, available somewhere? I would really appreciate them if possible!

  
  Sorry, I did not manage to reply before the other thread was locked.  Lisa made the scans available on Google Drive some months ago:
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  Only 10 of the pages were scanned. For 8 of those, I converted the TIFF files to PNG (less than 1/2 the size with no loss of information), rotated them to be upright, and extracted some clips that interested me.  (I skipped You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f47r; will get to them some day). 
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  See the file 00-Notebook.txt in that directory for an explanation of the file structure.  Note that all images will look black if displayed "as-is" because (like the original TIFFs) they have 16 bits per sample but use only 12 or so.   So each image should be scaled by 65535/maxval where the maxval value is given in the file "bands.txt" in each page's folder.
  
  

  Quote:Now, about the reflectivity/absorption of iron-gall inks, I do wonder if this is influenced by the thickness of the ink, the composition of the ink, and the amount of time the ink has been exposed to the elements. The paper you linked appears to be discussing iron-gall ink that is hidden under paint, and is thus not exposed to the atmosphere. Ink that may have oxidised/reacted over centuries may have different absorptive properties to "fresh" iron-gall ink.

  
  The thickness is sufficient for the ink to look dark brown under visible light, so it should be thick enough to look dark also under IR, if the material did absorb IR.
  
  The effect definitely depend on the composition of the ink, and that is the point.  But if it were IGI, there is not much room for variation in the composition.  
  
  Maybe the the ink was IGI but the tannin has degraded and left behind only the iron as iron oxide.   I don't know if that can happen.  (I think that IGI is indigest even to fungi.) But that would have made the ink damageable by water or rubbing, as if it were watercolor ink. Considering what we can see on f116r, the ink was "not IGI" already centuries ago.
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  oshfdk > Yesterday, 07:10 PM

  I'm not sure if we should rely on this information about IR and iron gall inks. For starters, they appear to have analyzed relatively fresh ink, as it is stated in the supplementary PDF from the article: 
  
  

  Quote:IR reflectance properties of iron gall ink (red) beneath a cadmium yellow paint layer
  [23] (p. 57). The ink was produced according to recipe 208 and 211 from the Liber
  illuministarum [24]

  
  Also, it's not hard to find completely different reports from papers studying actual medieval manuscripts. There is a whole section titled "3.3 Visualizing iron-gall ink underdrawing" in the following paper:  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  In which it is stated:
  
  

  Quote:Given that the texts of medieval manuscripts often were written in iron-gall ink, it is not surprising that underdrawings of manuscript illuminations were drawn in this medium as well. However, the detection of iron-gall ink can be difficult, as it is not readily visualized by IR imaging due to its low absorption in the IR.

  
  Then it references some articles, but I think they are paywalled.

• RE: The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  oshfdk > Yesterday, 07:28 PM

  Also there is a paper that discusses comparing two types of iron gall ink by whether they remain high contrast or become faint in IR: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  Is says things like "The difference in the appearance of the inks results from their composition – greyish ink probably has more iron (vitriol).", which to me sounds as if iron-rich iron gall inks become fainter in IR?
  
  EDIT: the bottom line for me, there are different compositions of iron gall inks and they don't all behave the same, so I don't think we can exclude iron gall ink just using a single reference in one article.

• RE: The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  Aga Tentakulus > Yesterday, 07:33 PM

  From a process engineering perspective, it matters whether something is dissolved or not.
  Sugar and salt dissolve in water. I can’t filter them out anymore.
  Ground activated carbon mixed with water—in that case, the particles can be filtered out again.
  Turkish coffee. You have to wait until the particles have settled before drinking it. It contains both the dissolved portion and the particles.
  The dissolved coffee is absorbed into the parchment, but the particles just sit on top.
  One is subject to abrasion, but the other is not.
  I also rule out bleaching by sunlight, since only two pages of a book are exposed to the sun when it’s open.
  
  Iron or not is irrelevant.
  
  Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

• RE: The VMS ink is NOT iron-gall

  Aga Tentakulus > Yesterday, 07:42 PM

     
  
  Particles can't be filtered through parchment, but the dissolved substance can.
  So, here's the question for Lisa again.
  Can the filtered text be made visible with UV light?
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