Nick Pelling online radio interview with Red Ice Creations…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things Voynich… and an hour later I eventually ran out of steam. 🙂

Pretty much all the fashionable VMs research topics you’d expect to me to crank out – Wilfrid Voynich, John Dee, Rudolf II, Rene Zandbergen, Sinapius, Newbold, dating, TV documentaries, the nine-rosette page, page references, the evolution of Voynichese, cipher history, Trithemius, Leon Battista Alberti, unbreakable ciphers, intellectual history, books of secrets, Brunelleschi’s hoist, enciphered machines, Voynich Bullshit Index, Quattrocento intellectual paranoia, patents, even quantum computing! – get covered, so there should be something there for nearly everyone. 🙂

And if that’s not enough for you, Red Ice Radio has a 45-minute follow-on interview with me in their member-only area: this covers cryptology, intractability, alchemy, Adam Maclean, hoax theories, Gordon Rugg, Cardan grilles, postmodernism, astronomy, astrology (lunar and solar), calendars, Antonio Averlino / Filarete, canals, water-powered machines, (not) the head of John the Baptist, Alan Turing, Enigma, Pascal, the Antikythera Mechanism, Fourier analysis, Ptolemaic epicycles, Copernicus, Kepler, Kryptos sculpture, Tamam Shud, Adrenalini Brothers, steganography, copy vs original, wax tablets, even al-Qaeda!

OK, I’m not a professional broadcaster, and it’s all impromptu (so there are a handful of pauses), but it does bring plenty of Voynich-related stuff that’s appeared here over the last 18 months together into a single place. Enjoy!

VBI, now in English English!

by ⋅ 4 Comments

His eyes stinging from all the Google Translate hits popping up on his server logs (what did I tell you?), Elias Schwerdtfeger posted up an English translation of his Voynich Bullshit Index post from a couple of days ago, no doubt cursing me through gritted teeth as he typed. 🙂

By my reckoning, I reckon my Averlino theory in “The Curse of the Voynich” gets:

  • 10 points initial float (i.e. for having any kind of theory)
  • 2 points x 8 years wasted
  • 9 points x 2 identified nine-rosette buildings – St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Castello Sforzesco in Milan
  • 9 points x 2 buildings identified after visiting them

…that is, a grand total of 62 points. Not bad: but in the words of most school reports, Could Do Better. 🙂

Q13 and Voynich balneology sources…?

by ⋅ 10 Comments

One of the (frustratingly small) number of art history leads the Voynich Manuscript’s author dangles before our eyes is the balneology part of Q13 (“quire 13”). Specifically, there are two bifolios that depict baths and pools, where the pictures helpfully allow us to reconstruct what the page layout originally was:

          84r/84v – contains Q13’s quire number (which should be at the back for binding)
            78r/78v – contains left half of a two-page bath picture (should be centrefold)
            81r/81v – contains right half of a two-page bath picture (should be centrefold)
          75r/75v

The centrefold originally looked like this (my red boxes highlight a paint transfer):-

Voynich Manuscript, page f78v placed next to f81r

This codicological nuance demonstrates that Q13’s quire number was added after the bifolios had been scrambled, because the page it was written (f84v) on was originally inside the quire, on a bifolio that ended up both flipped and in the wrong position. In “Thc Curse” (pp.62-65), I tried to follow this through to reconstruct the original page order for the whole of Q13.

Fascinatingly, Glen Claston has now raised this whole idea up to a whole different level – he proposes that Q13 was originally two separate (smaller) quires which have been subsequently merged together. According to his reading, the four folios listed above originally formed a free-standing balneological quire (which he calls “Q13b“), while the remaining bifolios form a free-standing medicinal / Galenic quire all on its own (which he calls “Q13a“).

Even though Glen and I disagree on the likely page order of Q13a (apart from the fact that the text-only f76r was very probably the first page, and hence its bifolio was the outer bifolio for the quire) and on its probable content, I have to say that I’m completely sold on his proposed Q13a / Q13b layout (basically, I wish I’d thought of it first – but I didn’t, Glen did). We also agree that because there is no indication at all that f84r was the front page of the quire, there was probably an additional (but now lost) outer bifolio to Q13b in its original state.

Glen also infers (from the apparent evolution of the language between the two parts) that Q13b was made first, with Q13a coming later. Having mulled over this for a few weeks now, I have to say I find this particularly intriguing because of what I believe is a subtle change in quality between the drawings in Q13b and Q13a that strangely parallels the change in drawings between Herbal-A pages and Herbal-B pages.

My key observation here is that whereas Q13b’s drawings appear to be straightforward representations of baths and pools, Q13a’s drawings appear to have layers of rendering and meaning beneath the representational surface: that is, while Q13b is a small treatise on baths, Q13a is a small treatise on something else, rendered in the style of a small treatise on baths. As an example, on f77v you can see something literally hiding behind the central nymph at the top – but what is it?

voynich-f77v-central-nymph

This closely mirrors what I see in the herbal A & B sections: while Herbal-A pages (from the earliest phase of construction) appear to be representing plants (if sometimes in an obscure way), Herbal-B pages (which were made rather later) appear to be something else entirely made to resemble a treatise on plants.

My current working hypothesis, therefore, is that the representational (if progressively more distorted) Herbal-A pages and the representational Q13b balneological section preceded both the non-representational Herbal-B pages and the non-representational Q13a pages, both of which are disguised to look like their respective predecessor, while actually containing something quite different.

(As an aside, the same kind of mechanism might be at play in the pharma section: there, too, you can see ‘jars’ that seem to be purely representational, together with other things that seem to be disguising themselves as ornate jars. Very curious!)

This has a strong parallel with the way that recent art historians (such as Valentina Vulpi) decomposes Antonio Averlino’s libro architettonico into multiple writing phases: In “The Curse” (pp.106-107), I proposed a slightly more radical version of Valentina’s thesis – that Averlino (Filarete) targeted Phase 1 at Francesco Sforza, Phase 2 at Galeazzo Maria Sforza, and Phase 3 at both Francesco Sforza & Lorenzo de’ Medici. In the case of the VMs, I suspect that some of the difficulties we face arise from broadly similar changes in need / intention / strategy over the lifetime of the construction – that is, that the style of the cipher and drawings probably evolved in response to the author’s life changes.

As far as art history goes, though, Q13b appears to give us a purely representational (if enciphered!) connection with baths and pools – places associated in the Middle Ages and Renaissance with healing. Bathhouses were usually situated in the centre of towns and were used by urban folk: while natural spas and pools were thought to have specific healing powers based on their particular mineral content, were usually in fairly inaccessible places, and tended to be frequented by the well-off at times of ill-health (for you needed resources to be able to fund a party to trek halfway up a mountain).

So… might there be an existing textual source where this (presumably secret) information on baths and spas could have come from?

The main source for medieval balneological information was Peter of Eboli’s much-copied De Balneis Puteo (which was hardly a secret): when I wrote “The Curse”, the two main Quattrocento balneological discussions I knew of were by Antonio Averlino and by the doctor Michele Savonarola. I also pointed out that that the (now misbound) Q13 centrefold (f78v and f81r) resembles “the three thermal baths at the Bagno di Romana. Of these, the ‘della Torre’ bath was used for showers, the ‘in-between bath’ was used to treat various illnesses and skin complaints; while the third one was more like a women’s spa.” (p.63)

However, I recently found a nice 1916 article online called “Balneology in the Middle Ages” by Arnold C. Klebs. Klebs notes (which I didn’t know) that the fashion for balneology died around 1500, fueled by a widespread belief that baths and spas were one of the causes of the spread of syphilis. Errrm… that would depend on what you happened to be doing in the baths (and with whom), I suppose. Here are some other fragments from the last few pages of Klebs’ article which might well open some doors:

In Giovanni de Dondis we usually hail the early apostle of exact balneology. Whatever his right to such honour may be, it must be mentioned that it rests on his attempt to extract the salts of the thermal of Abano.

Gentile da Foligno (died 1348), […] a great money-maker and promoter of the logical against the empirical method in medicine. He wrote a little treatise on the waters of Porreta, the chief interest of which may be found in the fact that it was the first to appear in print (1473).

Ugolino Caccino, of Montecatini (died 1425). He came from that thermal district not far from Florence, in the Valdinievole, which has still preserved its ancient reputation as a spa. Evidently he was a man of broad and open-minded scholarship, who in his treatise on all the Italian spas, the first thorough one of the kind, gives the results of his own personal observations, stating clearly when he is reporting from the information of others.

Matteo Bendinelli (1489) sums up for them all, in his treatise on the baths of Lucca and Corsenna,…

Michele Savonarola, representing Padua and the new school of Ferrara. To him European balneologrv owes the most ambitious work on the mineral springs of all the countries.

De Balneis omnia quae extant,” Venice, Giunta, 1553, fol., 447 leaves. This fine collection, the first text-book on balneology, offers to the interested student a mine of information.

The Voynich Cipher for code-breakers…

by ⋅ 45 Comments

Though (as was apparent from the rapid social media take-up of yesterday’s XKCD webcomic) the Voynich Manuscript is now firmly wedged in the cultural mind, sadly the level of debate on it is still stuck circa 1977 – and if anything, Gordon Rugg’s foolish “hoax” claims have helped to keep it there.

But it is demonstrably written in cipher: and so this post tells you why I’m certain it’s a cipher, how that cipher works, and what you can do to try to break it. I’m happy to debate this with people who disagree: but you’ll have to bear in mind that as far as this goes, I’m just plain right and you’re just plain wrong. 🙂 

1. What does the Voynich Manuscript resemble?

Firstly, the overwhelming majority of the Voynich Manuscript is written using only 22 or so letter-shapes: generally speaking, this is the size of a basic European alphabet. Voynichese therefore visually resembles an ordinary European language.

Secondly, even though most of its letter shapes are unknown or unusual, four of them (“a”, “o”, “i”, and “e”, though this last one is styled as “c”) closely resemble vowels in European languages – not only in shape, but also because if you read these as vowels (precisely as the main EVA transcription does), you end up with many CVCVCV (consonant-vowel) patterned words that seem vaguely pronounceable.

Thirdly, dotted through the Voynich Manuscript is a family of letter-groups that look like “aiv”, “aiiiv”, “aiir”, etc. To most contemporary eyes, this looks like some kind of curious language-pattern: but to European people in the 13th to 16th centuries, this denoted one thing only: page references.

  • The “a” denotes the first quire (bound set of folded vellum or paper leaves), “quire a”.
  • The “i” / “ii” / “iii” / “iiii” denotes the folio (leaf) number within the quire (in Roman numbers).
  • The “r” / “v” denotes “recto” / “verso”, the front-side or rear-side of the leaf.

Circa 1250-1550, this “mini-language” of page references was universally known and recognized across Europe: and hence “aiiv” denotes “quire a, folio ii, verso side” and nothing else.

Therefore, the Voynich Manuscript resembles a document written in a 22-letter European language, contains obvious-looking vowel-shapes that are shared with existing European languages, and scattered throughout apparently has copious page-references to pages within its first quire.

However, what even very clever people continue to fail to notice is that these three precise things (the compact alphabet, the obvious-looking vowels, and the page references) have an exact corollary: that this does not resemble ciphertext – for even by 1440, most European cipher-makers knew enough about the vulnerabilities of vowels to disguise them by use of homophones (i.e. using multiple cipher symbols for the vowels). A ciphertext would not contain unenciphered vowels, not unenciphered page references.

The correct answer to the question is therefore not only that the Voynich Manuscript does resemble an unknown (but CVCVCV-based) European language studded with conventional Roman number page references, but also that it simultaneously does not resemble a ciphertext.

2. Why is the Voynich Manuscript not what it resembles?

I think the big clue is the fact that the page references don’t make any sense as page references.

For a start, even though the Voynich Manuscript probably consisted of fifteen or more quires, the page references that appear throughout its text only ever appear to refer to quire “a” (the first quire). What’s more, the first quire appears not to be marked with any form of “a” marking, which is curious because the whole point of quire signatures was to make sure that the binder bound them together in the correct order. Another odd thing is that there only appears to be references to the first six pages of the first quire.

All very strange: but the biggest giveaway comes from the statistics. Counting the number of instances of the different page references, you’ll see that page references to verso pages apparently outnumber page references to recto pages by eight times. Here are the raw counts (from the Takahashi transcription):-

air ( 564)   aiir ( 112)  aiiir (  1)
aiv (1675)   aiiv (3742)  aiiiv (106)

So, even though these superficially resemble page references, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is what they actually are. In fact, the statistics imply the opposite – that despite their visual resemblance to page references, these are not actually page references.

And if it is correct that these are actually something else masquerading as page references, the entire visual-resemblance house of cards collapses – that is, if things are not what they seem, the other visual presumption (that this is a simple CVCVCV-based European language) necessarily falls down with it.

3. If the page references aren’t page references, what are they?

This is precisely the right question to ask: and so, when I visited the Beinecke Library in early 2006, I decided to spend some time looking at a single page containing plenty of clearly-written page references (as described in The Curse of the Voynich, pp.164-168) to try to answer it.

I chose page f38v, from which here are all the page reference letter clusters – can you now see what it took me hours and hours to notice?

f38v-page-reference-groups

The first thing I (eventually) noticed was that there was something a little odd about the top part of the “v” letter (which EVA wrongly transcribes as “n”, incidentally). Specifically, that many of the clusters appear to have been written using two inks – one forthe main “aiiv” part, and another (often slightly darker) one for the scribal “flourish” at the top.

But then… once you start looking specifically at the “v flourishes”, the next thing you might notice is that some appear to have a dot at the (top-left) end of the v-flourish.

The final thing you might notice is that these dots tend to appear in different places relative to the “aiiv” frame.

My conclusion is that what is happening here is steganography – that the position of the dot at the end of the v-flourish is what (possibly together with the choice of cluster) is enciphering the information here.

But what information is being enciphered in this way? I strgonly suspect that it is enciphering Arabic numbers 1-5 (probably with longer flourishes denoting larger numbers), and with “oiiv” clusters perhaps denoting 6-10. This might explain why we see so many of these “page references” immediately following each other (the famous “daiin daiin” pattern): each “page reference” therefore represents a digit within a multi-digit Arabic number.

However, what is strange is that this is only basically true for “Currier A-language” pages (Prescott Currier noted that, to a large degree, the text in Voynich Manuscript pages behaves in one of only two different ways): for Currier B pages, what seems to happen is that the information is enciphered by using different shaped flourishes for the final “v” character, and no dot.

From all this, I think I can reconstruct how the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher system evolved during its writing. In the early (Currier A) phase, some kind of data (probably Arabic numbers) were steganographically hidden by writing page-reference-like “aiiv” groups and placing a single dot above them. At a later date, however, the author decided (rightly, I think) that this was too obvious, and so went through the text hiding the dots by converting them into flourishes. Whereas in the later (Currier B) phase, the author decided to evolve the writing system to encipher the same data in a subtly different way (though still relying on the basic “page-reference” shape as a starting point).

And so the correct answer to the section’s question is: even though the “page reference” groups resemble page references, I think that they are cryptographic nulls designed to give the author sufficient visual space on the page to steganographically hide something completely different – probably Arabic numbers.

Of course, existing EVA transcriptions capture only the covertext (the nulls), while the actual data is enciphered in the dots hidden by the flourishes. But you have start somewhere, right? 🙂

4, What, then, is Voynichese’s CVCVCV structure concealing?

I am certain that the Voynich Manuscript’s apparent “consonant-vowel”-like structure is another visual trap into which the existing EVA transcription (unfortunately) helps to push people. By making Voynichese seem vaguely pronounceable (“otolal”, “qochey”, “qokeedy”, etc), EVA discourages us from looking at what is actually going on with the letters, while also falsely bolstering the confidence of those sufficiently deceived into believing (wrongly) that Voynichese is written in a real language. Basically, anyone who tells you it’s written in an archaic language has fallen into a gigantic intellectual trap first set five centuries ago.

But what of the CVCVCV structure? Where does that come from?

For the most part, I think that it arises from a late cipher stage known as “verbose cipher” (i.e. enciphering a single plaintext letter as two ciphertext letters). Though not all letters behave in this way, it certainly goes a very long way to explain the behaviour of common groups such as: qo, ol, al, or, ar, ot, ok, of, op, yt, yk, yp, yf, cth, ckh, cfh, cph, ch, sh, air, aiir, od, eo, ee, and eee. If you decompose the text into these subgroups (i.e. that these groups encipher individual tokens in the plaintext) while remembering to parse the “qo” group first, all the superficial CVCVCV behaviour disappears – and (I contend) you will find yourself very much closer to a kind of raw ciphertext stream that is more easily broken.

As supporting evidence, I point to those few places where the author has “twiddled” with the final code-stream to try to disguise obvious repeated patterns, arising from repeated letters in the plaintext (code-makers hate repeated patterns in their ciphertext). Perhaps the most notable of these is on f15v, where the “or” pattern appears three times in succession on line 1, and four times in a row on lines 2:-

f15v-space-transposition

I think that the author has added spaces in here to try to disguise the repeated “or” group: in line 1, he has inserted a space to turn “ororor” into “oror or“, while in line 2 he has inserted three spaces to turn “orororor” into “or or oro r“. I’m not fooled by this – are you?

I predict here that that “or” is enciphering “c” or “x” (probably “c”), and that the plaintext reads “ccc … cccc”: but you guessed that already, right?

5. Even if this is right, how does it help us break the Voynich?

I don’t believe for a moment that this explains the whole of the Voynichese cipher system: there are plenty of subtly surprising features that any proposed solution would also need to explain, such as:-

  • Precisely how (and why) Currier A and Currier B differ (for example, the whole word-initial “l” thing)
  • Why “yk / yt / yf / yp” occur more in labels than in normal paragraphs
  • Why so few non-trivial words appear more than once across the whole manuscript text
  • What “4o” codes for (I suspect a common initial-letter expansion, i.e. [qo] + ‘c’ –> ‘con’)
  • What word-initial “8” codes for (I suspect “&”)
  • What non-word-initial “8” and “9” code for (I suspect ‘contraction’ and ‘truncation’)
  • Whether the ciphering system is stateless or stateful (but that’s another story)
  • What “Neal keys” denote (but that’s another story, too)
  • etc

However, what I do believe is that all the above lays down the basic groundwork from which any sensible cipher attack would need to launch forwards. I do not share the widely-held pessimistic view that the Voynich is somehow intrinsically unbreakable – on the contrary, it is an all-too-human artefact from a specific time (between 1450 and 1500) and place (probably Northern Italy, though Germany is possible too), and the craft techniques it deftly uses to conceal its content from us are both far from invisible and far from infallible.

If you take the basic steps I describe above to look beyond the deliberate deception and the mythology, then I am certain you will find yourself on the right path towards seeing clearly both what the Voynich Manuscript actually is and how its cipher system works. Let me know when you’ve broken it! 🙂

Incidentally, there’s plenty more related stuff in my 2006 book (which is where the two diagrams above came from, p.165 and p.160 respectively)… but you knew that already, I’m sure. 🙂

Some new Voynich Manuscript blogs…

by ⋅ 8 Comments

(1) A big hello to Rich SantaColoma as he emerges from the VMs “List Closet” into the bright(-ish) light of the blogosphere. His “New Atlantis Voynich Theory” blog sets out his basic stall – which is that, thanks to his “Nagging Sense of Newness” about the Voynich Manuscript, he harbours strong doubts that it is anywhere near as old as mainstream Voynich researchers (such as, errrm, me, apparently) think it is.

The truth is that historians have basically frittered the last century away on foolish conceits (such as the Roger Bacon thing, the Dee-and-Kelley thing, or the it’s-a-hoax-because-the-NSA-can’t-break-it thing), and so until such time as a single proper codicological and palaeographical analysis comes along to define the research problem properly, we’ll remain in the same old evidential free-fall.

As for me, I’m sticking with John Manly’s assessment (that the quire numbers were added in the 15th century) as a basic starting point for the dating: and if that turns out to be wrong, then so be it. That doesn’t make me “mainstream”, just… old-fashioned, I guess. 🙂

Incidentally, it’s a little-known fact that the Beinecke’s catalogue originally listed MS 408 as fifteenth century, but that in the 1970s (perhaps as a result of Brumbaugh’s wobbly claims?) this got extended forwards to the sixteenth century… I suspect they got it right the first time round.

PS: Rich, given that I think Q13 has a water theme, I’m sticking with the catoblepas (with its heavy head hanging down) rather than the armadillo – given that even Leonardo wrote that the catoblepas was found at the Nigricapo [the source of the Niger river], it was very much part of the mental landscape of the Florentine Quattrocento.

(2) And another big hello to (the apparently email-address-less?) “acevoynich” and [his/her] eponymic “acevoynich’s blog“. Though given [his/her] apparent inability to find Cipher Mysteries, the Voynich Manuscript Mailing List, The Journal of Voynich Studies, voynich.nu, the Voynich Wikipedia site, the Voynich dmoz entry, etc (let alone D’Imperio or The Curse) I have to say I’m somewhat dubious that [he/she] is, as [he/she] claims, actually writing a “thesis”. Does [he/she] really have a research question in mind, or is [he/she] just a [troll/trollette]? Hmmm…

Still, acevoynich feels confident to ask the five key W-questions of the big V-manuscript: who, what, where, when, why. Again, I refer the honourable member to my previous answer: and add that until such time as we have the forensic side (the “What happened?” question) considerably more locked down than it is at the present, I suspect that these W’s are (sad as it is) actually more harmful than helpful. Oh well! 🙁

Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Filarete… aha!

by ⋅ 8 Comments

Right at the start of (1970) “Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions” (pp. xi-xiii), Frank Prager summarizes Gustina Scaglia’s research into how Brunelleschi’s ideas for machines spread. They posit a key missing manuscript (dubbed “The Machinery Complex“): but their discussion is fairly specialised, and so it is quite tricky to follow. Here’s my attempt at representing the argument – green boxes represent manuscripts that still exist, red boxes represent lost works, while blue boxes I’m not sure about:-

machinery-complex

Which is to say: while all the early Renaissance machine ideas ultimately stemmed from Brunelleschi, later machine authors (such as Francesco di Giorgio) relied not just on Taccola’s De Ingeneis but also on the missing “Machinery Complex” manuscript. However, nobody knows who wrote this or what subsequently happened to it – we can perceive it only by its shadow, hear it only by its echo in other manuscript and copyworks.

I think the reason that Prager & Scaglia’s text is a little confused is that, because the Machinery Complex ms has disappeared, they can’t quite make up their minds how much it influenced subsequent writers on machines such as Bartolomeo Neroni, Antonio da San Gallo, Oreste Biringuccio, and Pietro Cataneo. It’s an open question.

But here’s where it becomes a cipher history issue. As I mentioned here a few days ago, the text around what Prager and Scaglia call “the secret hoist” is written in an simple substitution cipher (one letter back in the alphabet) – but because this would have been seen as a childishly simple cipher by 1450, I infer that this ciphertext was not only present in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original (but now lost) Zibaldone, but also that he probably wrote it in the 1430s or, at a push, the 1440s.

There’s also a cipher / codicological element to this argument, based on the observation that the pages containing the secret hoist are separated by several pages in the later copy of the Zibaldone (by Lorenzo Ghiberti’s grandson Buonaccorso Ghiberti). My suggestion is that Buonaccorso received the folios out of order, but copied them in precisely the same order – had he deciphered the two “secret hoist” pages and grasped that they were referring to the same thing, my guess is that he would have put them back into their correct order.

All in all, then, my inference here is that the simple cipher on the secret hoist was in place in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original Zibaldone, and that even though Ghiberti himself died in 1455, we can probably date his missing Zibaldone to around the 1430s purely from the simplistic cipher used in it. (Of course, scientists hate this kind of art history “probabilistic proof”, but that’s how history works.)

So far, so marginal: but here’s my “aha” moment of the day, that propels all this into a different league.

One of the things I flagged in my book “The Curse of the Voynich” (pp.141-142) was that Antonio Averlino (Filarete) may have based his (now-lost) book of Engines (“when the time comes, I will mention all these engines“, etc) on this (also now-lost) Machinery Complex – and that some of these engines may well be visually enciphered in the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal-B pages.

However, on further reflection, it seems I really didn’t go far enough: because Antonio Averlino almost certainly started his career in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s workshops, before suddenly leaving Florence in 1433 for Rome. If we were looking for someone to carry Brunelleschi’s ideas (via Ghiberti’s Zibaldone, probably written in the 1430s) into the world, we could surely do no better than look to Antonio Averlino – I strongly suspect that he was the intermediary.

So, the question then becomes: was Antonio Averlino the author of the Machinery Complex? I strongly suspect that he was, and that the Machinery Complex will turn out to be a synthesis and development of Ghiberti’s ideas as seen from Averlino’s edgy and ambitious perspective – that is to say, that the Machinery Complex will turn out to be Averlino’s missing book of Engines. And if it also turns out (as I suspect it will) to be the case that this Machinery Complex lies visually enciphered in the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal-B pages, what an extraordinary story that would be…

PS: as a footnote for further study, the only other paper I have found on the Machinery Complex was on The Art of Invention bibliography webpage: Gustina Scaglia’s (1988) “Drawings of forts and engines by Lorenzo Donati, Giovanbattista Alberti, Sallustio Peruzzi, The Machine Complex Artist, and Oreste Biringuccio“, Architectura, II, pp. 169-97. Definitely a paper to go through to see what conclusions Scaglia had reached about this intriguing missing document. But please let me know if you find any other references!

Voynich Photoshop gags…

by ⋅ 8 Comments

Cracked.com is running a Photoshop contest – “The retarded Truth behind the World’s Greatest Mysteries”. Truth be told, my favourite entry is mrlarry’s tame dinosaur moving Stonehenge’s stones in its mouth. But there are a couple of Voynich Manuscript themed entries too…

voynich-sanchez-small
Sanchez’s competition entry (quarter size)

The VMs as drawn by a child? Sweet Photoshop technique, but probably not quite ‘retarded’ enough to win. The second entry is a bit like a hi-tech version of David N. Guy’s Voynich “Breakthrough” we saw a few days ago:-

voynich-danthegreat-small
Dan The Great’s competition entry (quarter size)

Yes, it does indeed read “With great haste he removed her underpinings. The hour of fornication was nigh.” Hmmm… perhaps the smart money’s still on the dinosaur. 🙂

Incidentally, the Voynichese (from f15v) appropriated here just happens to be the two lines where I think the author used a space transposition cipher (i.e. moving spaces around within the ciphertext) to hide the repetitive “or or or” and “or or or or” by writing them as “oror or” and “or or oro r” respectively [Curse, p.160]. 🙂  It’s also a bit odd that the first letter of the second line is rendered as EVA “l” – in Jorge Stolfi’s transcription, it’s weirdo #138, more like a malformed EVA “s”. Oh well.

Incidentally, John Stojko translated this same passage as “Why are you measuring the measure? The measure is the same.  Even after Great One, the bones will be broken. I am telling you. Relic should believe me. ” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether (Dan’s) Babel Fish’s “With great haste…” is better or worse, I couldn’t possibly judge such a beauty contest. 🙂

Voynich Ms Reading List Recommendations…?

by ⋅ 53 Comments

In a comment to a recent post on Alberti & Averlino, ‘infinitii’ asks what my recommendations would be for a Voynich Manuscript reading list… a deceptively hard question.

Apart from the direct literature on the subject (Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”, my “The Curse of the Voynich”, and perhaps even Kennedy & Churchill’s “The Voynich Manuscript”), probably the best first step would always be to buy yourself a copy of “Le Code Voynich” – not for its prolix French introduction *sigh*, but simply so that you can look at the VMs’ pages in colour. The best guide to the manuscript still remains the evidence of your own eyes. 🙂

All of which is the easy, lazy blogger answer: but the kind of proper answer infinitii alludes to would be much, much harder. I should declare here that the VMs’ life in Bohemia (and beyond) strikes me as merely a footnote to the main story (though admittedly one that has been interminably expanded, mainly for lack of proper research focus).. Given that I’m convinced (a) 1450 is pretty close, date-wise; (b) Northern Italy is pretty close, location-wise; and (c) it’s almost certainly some kind of enciphered book of secrets, then the main subject we should be reading up on is simply Quattrocento books of secrets.

Doubtless there are three or four literature trees on this that I’m completely unaware of (please tell me!): but as a high level starting point, I’d recommend Part One (the first 90 pages, though really only the last few touch on the 15th century) of William Eamon’s “Science and the Secrets of Nature” (1994). Unfortunately for us, Eamon’s main interest is in Renaissance printed books of secrets. “In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy a little I can read” (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra), indeed. 🙂

From there, you’ll probably have to drill down (as I did) to individual studies of single books. Virtually everything written by Prager and Scaglia fits this bill, such as  their “Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions” (1970) and “Mariano Taccola and His Book De Ingeneis” (1972). I recently blogged about Battisti and Battisti’s splendid “Le Macchine Cifrate di Giovanni Fontana” (1984), and that is also definitely one to look at (though being able to read Italian tolerably well would be a distinct help there). I’ve also read articles by Patrizia Catellani on Caterina Sforza’s “Gli Experimenti” (which has a smattering of cipher in its recipes), and read up on the possible origins of Isabella Cortese’s supposed “I Secreti” (which is about as late as I’ve gone). Beyond that, you’re pretty much on your own (sorry).

As general background for what secrets such books might contain, I can yet again (though I know that infinitii will groan) only really point to Lynn Thorndike’s sprawling (but wonderful) “History of Magic & Experimental Science” (particularly Volumes III and IV on the 14th and 15th century), and his little-read “Science and Thought in the XVth Century”. Thorndike’s epic books stand proud in the middle of a largely desolate research plain, somewhat like Kubrick’s black monoliths: if anything else comes close to them, I don’t know of it.

As far as Quattrocento cryptography goes, David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers” is (despite its size) no more than an apéritif to a book that has yet to be written. I found Paolo Preto’s “I Servizi Segreti” very helpful, though limited in scope. For Leon Battista Alberti’s cryptography, Augusto Buonafalce’s exemplary modern translation of “De Cifris” is absolutely essential.

What is missing? There are a few relevant books I’ve been meaning to source but haven’t yet got round to, most notably the century-old (but possibly never surpassed) “Bibliographical Notes on Histories of Inventions & Books of Secrets” by John Ferguson. You can buy an updated version with an index and a preface by William Eamon, for example from here.

In many ways the above is no more than a very personal selection of books, and one obviously based around my own particular research programme / priorities. Yet even though I have tried to cover the ground reasonably well over the last few years, there are doubtless large clusters of (for example Italian-language) papers, books and particularly dissertations I am completely unaware of.

It should be clear that I think the basic research challenge here is to build up a properly modern bibliography of Quattrocento books of secrets, and thereby to map out the larger literature field within which the whole idea of ‘the VMs as an enciphered book of secrets’ can be properly placed. Perhaps I should use this as a test case for open source history?

Alberti circa 1465…

by ⋅ 24 Comments

Though I have six (!) book reviews queued up, I simply can’t resist posting about what I’ve just read in Joscelyn Godwin’s “The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance” (which, strictly speaking, should be #7 in the review backlog).

On pp.11-13, Godwin (who you may remember from his epic translation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) writes about the Roman Academy, a group of humanist scholars in mid-Quattrocento Rome with a shared obsession with Ancient Rome, and who held “the opinion that there is no other world than this one, and that when the body dies, the soul dies, too: and that nothing is worth anything except for pleasure and sensuality” (according to the Milanese ambassador to the Vatican, Agostino de’ Rossi).  Pretty radical stuff for the time, wouldn’t you say?

The unofficial leader of the Academy was Bartolommeo dei Sacchi, A.K.A. “Platina”: when, in March 1468, the Pope had had enough of the Academy’s quasi-pagan heresy, Platina was one of the first to be seized and (so says Platina) tortured, even though ultimately none of the Academicians got convicted of anything. As an aside, Godwin mentions that Platina had already had a run-in with Paul II in 1464, when the Pope had dismissed the Papal Abbreviators, a a group of salaried Papal scholars, including Leon Battista Alberti.

This is the point where I say – hey, hold that thought. If Alberti had been kicked out of his scholarly Vatican job in 1464, and didn’t resume his architect work until S. Andrea in 1470, that would mean that he may well have been thrown the cryptography challenge as a kind of lifeline by a former Vatican boss. That is, that cryptography wasn’t just a spare time gig for Alberti, but rather that he must have seen it as a full-time career change. In “The Curse”, I reconstructed from De componendis cifris what I believe was the meeting between Alberti and Filarete (Antonio Averlino) in Rome in Autumn 1465 discussing their two very different conceptions of cryptography: but now, the knowledge that they were not only both ex-pat Florentine architects in their sixties but also both equally out of favour with their former set of patrons raises the stakes. Given the goldfish bowl-like nature of Roman society, it would have been rhetorically necessary for Alberti to dismiss Averlino’s competing cryptographic system – that is, Alberti couldn’t just ignore it and hope it would go away.

Alberti also worked on astronomy with the Florentine Paolo Toscanelli, who in turn was connected to Hellenophiles such as Filfelfo and George of Trebizond: so why is it such a surprise for people when I link Alberti and Averlino, when the two men were connected in so many ways through the dense network of lives, astronomy, architecture, and cryptography criss-crossing Quattrocento Northern Italy? Oh well…

New Leonardo + Voynich Ms + Tarot article…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

Edith Sherwood, everyone’s favourite Leonardo-wrote-the-Voynich-so-he-did theorist, has posted up an extensive (and fascinating) new article focusing mainly on the depictions of the sun, moon and stars in the Voynich Manuscript: the starting point of her journey is the striking similarity between suns and moons in the VMs’ “astronomical” Quire 9 and a sun/moon pair on a particular Afro-Portuguese ivory horn (#101) carved between 1495 and 1521. Essentially, the question she tries to tackle is: what on earth connects these two very disparate objects?

afro-portuguese-horn-101Afro-Portuguese Horn #101 (from Edith Sherwood’s site)

Unsurprisingly, she starts by linking the sun with the Visconti raza symbol (as per p.61 of my “The Curse of the Voynich”): but, even better, continues by connecting the sun/moon pair to two copies of Dante’s Commedia, as posted up by long-time Tarot researcher Robert V. O’Neill in Chapter 14 of his online article “Dante’s Commedia and the Tarot”.  O’Neill suggests connections between the Commedia manuscript illustrations (Sherwood describes these as 14th century “woodcuts”, probably a typo) and the designs found on early Tarot cards, in particular his Figure 37 (“late 14th century”) and Figure 39 (“mid 14th century”), though unfortunately he doesn’t give MS references for them. To all of which I would also add the probable connection between the circular arrays of VMs zodiac nymphs and Dante’s description of concentric rows of angels in Heaven (as per pp.36-37 of “The Curse”).

At first glance, Sherwood’s proposed iconographic connection between the Visconti-Sforza Tarot sun/moon, the carved ivory sun/moon, and the VMs sun/moon (essentially, though the carved ivory and the VMs were unlikely to be directly connected, they both had the Visconti-Sforza Tarot as a shared ancestor) seems perfectly reasonable. In fact, it almost amounts to an excellent example of the kind of “Voynich Research 2.0” 14th-century-centred art history I blogged about recently.

commedia-links

The problem with this is that it presupposes  a circa 1500 (basically, Leonardo-friendly) date for the VMs, without noting that there is an alternative  (and, given the 15th century quire numbers, I would say more likely) diffusion sequence that doesn’t rely on the Tarot at all. Remember, the similarities noted were between the VMs and the Commedia illustrations, not the Visconti-Sforza Tarot per se:-

commedia-links-v2

In her article, Edith Sherwood also makes a number of other fascinating observations and comparisons (to do with Apollo, with the water nymphs, and with the parallel hatching) which I’d really like to blog about in more detail, but quite frankly those will have to wait for another day.

Finally, Leonardo was anything but a child when he reached Milan in 1481 (when Sherwood suggests he probably first saw the Tarot), so her parallel claim that Leonardo can only have made the VMs as a (brilliant) child doesn’t really seem to stack up with her proposed Tarot connection anyway.

If you look at the VMs with truly open art historical eyes (as Sherwood set out to do), I think you will almost inevitably reach a certain position: it’s mid-Quattrocento Northern Italian, with its cryptographic roots in Milan, its intellectual roots in Florence, its stylistic roots in Venice, and its philosophical roots in Dante. Oh, and it was written by a secrets-obsessed right-hander with a far greater command of cryptography than Leonardo da Vinci ever had (Chapter 6 of “The Curse” has a detailed critique of Leonardo’s limited cryptography).

PS: I found Sherwood’s article through Google Adwords “Voynich written by a lefty?“: but if you want me to look at your Voynich site, please just email a link to me, it’s much cheaper (and quicker). 🙂