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RE: Flag Finials
Davidsch > 06-11-2016, 03:48 PM
I had to look it up.
A finial is an element marking the top or end of some object, often formed to be a decorative feature.
In that definition it could be the description of the "gallow characters" as well.
But what is the relation between a finial and the marginalia? (thread subject type) -
RE: Flag Finials
Koen G > 06-11-2016, 09:14 PM
Hi Marco
I generally believe in an early origin for the Voynich material, but the contents of some folios is clearly medieval. I think the examples you gathered here make a very good point for Italy.
Do you think we are looking for specific castles and towers or might it just show a certain architectural style? -
RE: Flag Finials
MarcoP > 06-11-2016, 10:08 PM
(06-11-2016, 09:14 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you think we are looking for specific castles and towers or might it just show a certain architectural style?
I think that the illustrations in the Voynich manuscript are too sketchy to allow for the identification of specific buildings. I am also not sure that they are meant to portray actual buildings: they might as well be allegorical, in my opinion. -
RE: Flag Finials
-JKP- > 07-11-2016, 12:23 AM
(06-11-2016, 01:44 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in Trento there are frescoes illustrating the 12 months. They were painted in 1400 ca.
The frescoes seem to represent both dovetail merlons (even if most represented crenelations have no dovetails) and flag finials towers. Details from the months of January (left) and May (right).
Marco, it's interesting that you found both of these expressed in a Trento manuscript. Trento was an important university town with a good library, and was an important stopping point for travelers crossing the mountains. It is also significant for having produced a sexually explicit manuscript not too long after the VMS (in the medical rather than pornographic sense) at a time when such manuscripts were rare. I haven't been able to find a copy online (only a couple of sample pages), but it bears some similarity to the subject matter in the VMS.
If you combine this information on the use of merlons and flags with some history from a century before the VMS, when Dante's Divine Comedy satirized the conflict between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs in a way that evolved into the Capulets and Montagues in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, you get a feel for how this political conflict between papists and the cultural elements (artists, scientists) was symbolically expressed in medieval art. Just as the red rose and white rose were important symbols for alchemy (and for political conflicts in England), square merlons and swallowtail merlons were important symbols for conservative and liberal branches of society and for conflicts that some (like Dante) felt were divisive and destructive.
The saddleback flags and the globes might not be political. They might be regional/cultural, or they might have political elements known only to people in medieval times. I haven't studied them enough yet to know for if they are significant beyond their decorative differences. Could the direction of the flags mean something? The direction of fingers in medieval manuscripts frequently had meaning (they could be attributes, dates, numbers, or allegorical messages depending on how they were drawn), so maybe the direction of the flags is significant as well. I tend to think the direction may not matter, but the fact that the flags were used in very specific regions at that time does seem significant. -
RE: Flag Finials
-JKP- > 07-11-2016, 12:38 AM
(06-11-2016, 10:08 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(06-11-2016, 09:14 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you think we are looking for specific castles and towers or might it just show a certain architectural style?
I think that the illustrations in the Voynich manuscript are too sketchy to allow for the identification of specific buildings. I am also not sure that they are meant to portray actual buildings: they might as well be allegorical, in my opinion.
Have you played the game Pictionary? I was playing it with some of my friends at a party some years ago and one of the players drew a line going straight up off the page and his partner immediately said "Empire State Building" (which was the correct answer).
If someone after that were to draw a line with an oval on top, I'm pretty sure his or her partner would immediately guess "Space Needle" since they live in that area and everyone there knows the Space Needle.
Sometimes if something is familiar and iconic, it takes very little information to recognize it. My feeling is that the castle and crenelation drawings in the VMS have enough detail that someone familiar with a particular route might recognize them, that they might be landmarks.
If the main road from A to B passes through the Alsace or Bavaria, one would see saddleback flags, if it then passed through Lombardy heading south, one would see Ghibelline merlons, if one then passed by Rome, one might see the leaning tower of Pisa sinking into the ground, and if one ended up in Naples or Salerno, one would be in a volcanically active area. I'm not saying this is the route necessarily expressed in the VMS rosettes page (if it's a map, then it's hard to determine scale), but symbols along those lines are certainly possible and might be recognizable to someone of the time. -
RE: Flag Finials
Koen G > 15-02-2017, 05:10 PM
Ooh and such nice tall ascenders! -
RE: Flag Finials
Diane > 18-02-2017, 03:12 AM
Dear all
Quote:JKP brought to our attention the flag finials decorating the rooftops of some of the buildings in the 9-rosette foldout.
JKP - could you add a link to where you brought our attention to this? Thanks.
Other notes
Folio "85v-and-86r" (beinecke foliation or "86v" on other sites) includes 3 roses, not nine.
Also I was left uncertain about the point that other contibutors intended to make, or what inference they expected readers to draw.
Without formal argument to prove it, I don't think we have enough reason to suppose the various structures are meant as literal portraits of the various buildings; that isn't the custom seen in Latin charts and mappaemundi. And since the whole folio (not just the 'minimap') IS a chart/map, comparisons to manuscript illuminations and ornament really aren't the most appropriate comparisons here.
I'd really enjoy reading some formally-argued and documented exposition of the 'central European' theory and its recent expansion, in that group, from 'German-Italian' to 'German-French', but it has yet to be done - if it can be done.
I'd at least like to see some reasonable explanation for assuming literalism, and for overlooking or positively rejecting the many other reasons that particular forms of building and ornamental detail were added to maps and other forms of imagery. Above all, one has to address the issue of contemporary significance borne by structures of particular forms, or carrying particular types of detailing.
It's easier to accept reliance on juxtaposition-and-reader's-inference to support an hypothesis when the Voynichero's argument doesn't obviously run counter to what we know about the history and attitudes informing western and non-western cartography during the 12th-mid-fifteenth centuries. And we know a fair bit.
re: 'European saddleback roofs with flags' - I don't see any flags. I doubt that it is reasonable to presume that the person who added these structures to the map had horizons as restricted as some members seem to assume.
The impression I get in reading a number of previous comments in this thread is that I'm supposed to infer that the images shown here offer compelling evidence as support for an idea that everything in the manuscript is an expression of some uniquely "Franco-German" culture - as sub-set within western Europe's Latin culture.
I've never seen any Voynich writer establish that such sub-culture existed at all. And demonstrating the validity of that notion is surely the fundamental stage in formulating an hypothesis, let alone trying to convince others to believe it.
Admittedly, the writers do not make clear whether their use of "Franco-German" is supposed to describe a particular school of manuscript art, or whether they mean "Franco-German" to refer to some line drawn by geography, politics, religion or a supposed folk-culture held in common by none but a 'Franco' and 'Germanic' population. I wonder if "Franco-German" is imagined (or not) to include the Anglo-French culture of England's elite, or whether the construct depends on modern political borders, on antiquated ideas about science, or some solid study of the medieval sources and more recent secondary studies.
Is northern Italy supposed 'Franco-German'? Are the Jews, the Greeks, the Bulgarians, Slavs, Muslims and others who lived in regions where French or German dialects were spoken supposed to be included in this definition of 'Franco-German'?
But if they are, then we are reduced to an absurd situation which does not help us limit our hunt for the manuscript's origin or the likely language of its content, so much as just expands the parameters of an obviously flawed theory (the 'central European Germanic') to a point where it means nothing at all.
If attribution to a Catalonian Jew in England, or a Greek in Mallorca or an Englishman in the Greek islands can all be adduced as proving a 'Franco-German' narrative, then we are definitely in a looking-glass world where the very idea of academic rigor is unknown. I've recently returned to an interesting observation made in Nick Pelling's book of 2006, one that had been relentlessly ignored since then, and which shows that someone who knew Occitan also wrote Voynichese. Another and later hand (possibly, but not certainly, of a German-trained scribe) wrote over the original text, but that of course is no evidence for 'Franco-Germanic' character for the Vms.
Swallowtail merlons
For a number of reasons, the structure with the 'swallowtail' battlements is unlikely to be meant for a nobleman's castle. Identifying the site was certainly far from easy, but after having examined a fair number of possibilities in considerable depth (i.e. by reference to the historical and archaeological sources as well as various maps, charts, and other documents), I came eventually - and after a couple of false starts - to the view that the structure is meant for Laiazzo/Ayas, the port of Cilician Armenia.
As the reason for addition of those 'imperial' merlons to the drawing in the Voynich map during that map's last major revision, I date the addition to between the second half of the thirteenth century and first half of the fourteenth.
The thirteenth - when Laiazzo was the only port available to the Genoese in the east Mediterranean.
The fourteenth - when Leo IV, ruler of Cilician Armenia, married Constance, daughter of Frederick III, king of Sicily.
Our first record of the 'swallow-tail merlons' use by Latins comes from Sicily, and to some they may have suggested not only Frederick II or 'imperial' in general, but the Sicilian rulers.
In saying that here, I anticipate some of the research informing the present series of posts going up at voynichimagery. The detailed comment on the swallowtail-merloned castle is scheduled to appear in ten days' time, but I may move it forward.
To muse over - absence of (or paucity of) Latin or Orthodox Christian crosses upon any of the buildings in the Voynich map.
Sorry about the following blank space: for some reason, I don't have the option to delete paragraph markers.