Review of David Gibbins’ “Atlantis”…

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This being Cipher Mysteries, I try to read a fair bit of mysterious cipher-related stuff along the way, both non-fiction and fiction. Yet just as you’d expect, most cipher mystery fiction tends more to the ‘airport novel’ end of the spectrum than the ‘lit-rit-cher’ end. Which pleasantly brings to mind (well, to my mind, at least) Elvis Costello’s “God’s Comic” as he finally meets his Maker:-

So there He was on a water-bed
Drinking a cola of a mystery brand
Reading an airport novelette
Listening to Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s “Requiem”

Nicely pitched scansion, and perhaps even more richly ironic if the airport novelette in question happened to have one of those interminably Byzantine two-millennia-long-conspiracy-to-hide-the-truth-about-Jesus’-non-death-on-the-cross plotlines we’re so waerily familiar with now. But I digress!

Wearing my book publisher hat, I’d say you can divide cipher mystery airport novel writers into three quite distinct camps:-

  1. The Rack Pack. People who write strings of pacy, mostly character-driven novels but who scout around for interesting historical stuff to build their fantastical plotting and obscure conspiracies around. (These books tend to suffer from “slabs”, i.e. lumps of undigested Wikipedia-style research littering the text, and to rely heavily on secondary characters who ‘just happen’ to be world-renowned Harvard Professors of Obscure Historical Linguistics etc. They can also be quite hard to tell apart).
  2. Domain Experts. People who happen to be experts in some technical / research field and fall victim to the questionable notion that a particular historical mystery that happens to overlap their field would make an amazing basis for a novel, but then decide to write that book. I mean, how hard can it be? (These books tend to suffer from inexpert plotting, clunky characterization, and non-credible relationships between characters. But at least most of the technical details are right).
  3. Wannabe Screenwriters. People who are terrifically personally ambitious and have a deep love of film, and who see the airport novel medium as a great way to express their high-octane visual imagination, while also giving themselves an outside chance of their books’ being optioned for a Major Motion Picture. (These books tend to be bad on just about every level you can name, but are probably a terrifically good read if you’re the kind of person who has a copy of “Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft” in your toilet).

All of which is a fairly longwinded way of introducing David Gibbins’ (2005) novel “Atlantis”. From the moment you read that the author “has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life” and that “[this] is his first novel“, you can be pretty sure that this is going to fall squarely into Camp #2 territory.

The cipher connection isn’t hard to work out: the front cover has a gold-embossed representation of something not unlike the Phaistos Disk, though it has to be said that the shapes are upside-down (relative to the real Phaistos Disk) and in a quite different order, while a few other plausible-looking pictogram-style shapes have been added to the mix. Though that’s OK, because these differences are part of the story (which kicks off with a second Phaistos Disk being discovered in an ancient shipwreck, but this time it’s made of gold).

Commendably, the spine of the book has one of the Phaistos Disc symbols (which Gibbins has both as “outstretched eagle god” and as the sign of “Atlantis”, though note that he requires you rotate it 90 degrees to see it even slightly as a bird), making it the only cipher novel I know of with a single genuine historical cipher mystery character shape as its central motif. Please tell me if there’s another one!

There’s actually a bit of literature on this shape, which is #21 in Sir Arthur Evans’ much-noted list of the disk’s pictograms. Here are some of the better-known theories about it proposed over the years:-

  • Comb (Godart, 1995)
  • Weaving comb (Dettmer, 1989)
  • Hoe or rake (Aartun, 1992)
  • Palace floor-plan (not sure who suggested this?)
  • Swedish rock carvings of a team of plowing oxen (Woudhuizen, !?!?!?!?)

More usefully, Balistier (2000) notes that Ingo Pini (1970) pointed out that this particular pictogram very likely has Minoan origins, as evidenced by the similarities between it and a five-toothed comb design found on clay fragment HM 992 (also found at Phaistos, and dating to the 18th century BC).  And here it is:-

HM-992

Clay fragment HM 1992: the five-pronged comb-like shape is on the left

 This striking visual parallel is often cited as proof of the Phaistos Disk’s authenticity, with the only small problem being that it may well be that Luigi Pernier ‘excavated’ them both… but that’s another story entirely.

Anyway, does Gibbins manage to save himself from falling into all the Domain Expert airport novel traps? Actually… no. And what’s worse, from the minute the protagonist Jack Howard (“unlikely scion of one of England’s most ancient families“, p.13) makes “a mental note to email the image to Professor James Dillen, his old mentor at Cambridge University and the world’s leading authority on the ancient scripts of Greece” (p.16), it’s abundantly clear that Gibbins has drunk too deeply from the Rack Pack’s well of clichés. Moreover, from the breathless military helicopter fetishism and Wired editorialese, he has dipped his bucket into the Wannabe Screenwriters’ gadget-strewn watering hole more than a few times as well.

All of which superficial nonsense I could actual forgive Gibbins for (it is, after all, an airport novel, and many top-tier writers have fallen into these same traps over the years). However (and sorry if this is a spoiler) the point near the end where Jack Howard unilaterally fires a nuclear warhead onto the bad guys’ hi-tech hide-out is just not OK by me. Yes, they killed his friends, etc etc: but a nuclear warhead? Really? Really??

It’s at this point the alert reader stops to wonder whether the whole book is some kind of high-camp “The Producers” so-bad-it’s-good joke, or some knowing Alan Sokal hoax on the airport novel genre, or perhaps even some Umberto Eco-esque prolonged literary inversion. Though these all sound fairly unbelievable, the alternative – that the author really thinks that this kind of stuff is OK – is so much worse that it’s not really conceivable. And once you’ve ruled out the impossible…

Hoax astronaut!

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I love this picture from the Porco Cane blog:-

During 1992 restoration work on the Cathedral of Salamanca, this astronaut ensnared by vines was added by Jeronimo Garcia, along with “a dragon eating ice cream, a lynx, a bull, and a crayfish“, all approved by the appropriate committee etc. Perhaps this will confuse archaeologists a millennium hence? Probably not.

Doubtless more than a few of our problems with the Voynich Manuscript arise from looking at it out of its original context: perhaps it too consists of ancient visual themes peppered with humorous contemporary additions, but we are too far removed in time to see the jokes, let alone get them?

Voynichese vs Marginalia – the nature of unreadability…

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Even when I’ve shown the VMs’ marginalia to some very clever, very experienced historians / palaeographers, you can see that there’s a easy stopping point tempting them: that because they are unreadable, they must necessarily be cryptographically unreadable.

But the two types of mark are manifestly not the same: they have quite different types of unreadability. That is, one seems intentionally unreadable, the other seems unintentionally unreadable. But even this overloads the word “unreadable” to breaking point, obscuring the core difference between the two which is this: that one is easy to apprehend but tricky to comprehend, while the other is easy to comprehend but tricky to apprehend. Alternatively, you can pitch this as “legible but obfuscated” vs “illegible but sensible”, if you think that helps. 🙂

What I’m clumsily trying to point out is that ‘unreadable’ is one of those words that really gets in the way of inter-domain collaboration, by offering up domain experts an easy alibi to avoid engaging with the VMs’ many problematiques. In the case of the VMs’ marginalia, the real reason an expert palaeographer should stand clear is the absence of a proper codicological analysis of the key pages supported by some state-of-the-art scans. Whereas this lacuna can be filled (in time), writing the marginalia off as necessarily cryptographic (and perhaps uncrackably so) is just crabwalking out of the way.

But perhaps I’m wrong, and the pragmatic reason historical experts feel comfortable manufacturing reasons (such as the above) not to get involved is that there is a fusty stench of unfunded academic death perceived to be lingering in the air above the VMs, by which I mean that they collectively think there is much more to lose by getting involved than there is to gain. Though in many ways such a view would be fair enough, few are brave enough to admit to it. Personally, I believe that there is an enormous amount to gain: but that the widespread (and arguably dominant?) contemporary practice of history as simply a close reading of fragments of historical texts is what gets in the way, as this does not give historians the tools to deal with a primarily non-verbal text situated outside most of the stylized art history mainstream.Creating alibis is much easier than having to face up to gaps in your core methodology.

New Romanian Voynich theory…

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Over the years, people have suggested all manner of languages (Tagalog, Hawaiian, Chinese etc) as the Voynich Manuscript’s plaintext, but might it be written in enciphered Romanian?

Historically, the notion is just about plausible: the earliest known piece of written Romanian is a letter written by a Neacşu of Câmpulung in 1512 (there’s a facsimile online, as well as a mercifully brief Wikipedia page), which is not terrifically far from the VMs’ timeline. And others have fleetingly suggested Romanian before: Kevin Knight’s well-known slides showed a machine-generated match for “VAS92 9FAE AR APAM ZOE ZOR9 QOR92 9 FOR ZOE89” [the first few words of f1r in Prescott Currier’s transcription] as Romanian (though admittedly Knight qualifies the auto-generated Romanian plaintext as “nonsense”). After all, Romanian is merely one of the many Romance languages, and we’ve had no shortage of those proposed.

So boldly step forward “Secret Sauce”, a member of the Ssssshh (“Super Secret History”) group of “less motivated and (less) enlightened Illuminati”, who all hail from Arizona somewhere utterly secret indeed. Except that their town “starts with a T and has an ASU in it“. Their image gallery shows clearly that the group has between four and five members, presumably depending on whether or not the waiter is taking the photo.

So far, so non-Romanian: but step through their “‎Doorway to the Origin of Never Told Ancient Secret Knowledge” (i.e. “DONTASK”)‎ and you’ll see that they take the radial labels on f67r1 (the famous APOD page) to be month names (ticking clockwise around from the double line in the outer rings) and use them as cribs into the underlying language. After looking at lots of month names in different languages, Secret Sauce noted that “traditional Romanian (or a closely related language) used terms for October and November which started with the same sound (B)“, and so concluded that enciphered Romanian would be a “likely candidate” for Voynichese’s plaintext. Follow this through and you get (if you squint a bit) a verbose-cipher-like set of correspondences between Voynichese and Romanian. Though it has to be said that quite a few Voynichese letters are marked up as corresponding to multiple plaintext Romanian letters. Nonetheless, here’s the start of Voynich Manuscript page f1r as deciphered into Romanian:-

Special-Sauce-Voynich-transcription

…(etc) which Special Sauce somewhat hopefully renders as…

There are many gifts (which have been) set aside to bestow upon (us) in return (for our) humility.

We journey through (life) in passionate servitude (to God).

(Our) Heavenly Mother has chosen to reward (us).

Forgiveness (is) the gateway (to) a wondrous celestial land.

(There is) a grand home in paradise (in which) to live.

(etc etc)

Even if I am somewhat impressed at seeing “yt” and “yp” translate to “h” and “p/pa” (respectively), I have to say I’m getting more than a hint of a Stojko / Levitov buzz off this. Which is to say that more or less any transliteration could be rendered into a stream of nearest-match word fragments, corrected into nearby target language words, the grammar fixed, lacunae filled, organized into short punchy sentence-like blocks, and then all translated and resequenced into something almost resembling language. This is broadly parallel to the the way that the liquid substance dished out by the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser to Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”.

Even if you do manage to overlook this kind of non-workingness, the problem then becomes that this kind of approach inevitably doesn’t scale up to a full-length document the size of the VMs: John Stojko couldn’t really explain why anyone would write such repetitive historico-religious “Old Ukrainian” nonsense on such a large scale, and the same would seem to be true here.

So… sorry, Special Sauce, but I don’t think you’ve cracked the secrets of the VMs yet. But here’s a modern-day secret that you might like!

Some nice manuscript-related links…

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Just as it says on the tin title, here are some nice manuscript-related links for you. 🙂

First off, I didn’t know until very recently that there was a Wikipedia entry on manuscript culture, which contains all kinds of manuscript-related bits and pieces (it puts the decline in trade for parchminers circa 1500, for example). However, I have to say that this whole account is constructed around an old-fashioned, rather brutally sequential model of how books linearly took over from manuscripts and thus caused the Renaissance, etc etc, which I don’t buy into even slightly. It seems (from the final section) that this is from the influence of historian Elizabeth Eisenstein: so, as with most things Wikipedian, “interesting, but ingest with caution“.

Secondly, here’s a EU collaborative website telling you (pretty much) everything you need to know about iron gall ink corrosion (yes, really), including chemistry, historical recipes and conservation strategies. There’s also an iron gall ink corrosion discussion list you can subscribe to… for myself, I wasn’t particularly tempted to join, but you might be. 🙂

Thirdly, here’s a nicely detailed page on vellum / parchment manufacture by SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) member Meliora di Curci, part of “The Royal College and Confraternity of Scribes and Illuminators of the Kingdom of Lochac“. All hail King Bran and Queen Lilya!

Fourthly, courtesy of the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest comes a really rather nice Medieval Manuscript Manual. Though I originally downloaded a PDF version of this from somewhere, the current version is all in HTML: there are also Italian, Russian and (unsurprisingly) Hungarian translations on the same site. What is so pleasant about this is that it floats in a sea of physical terms: brindle, piebald (from which we get “—bald eagle”), wing pinion, barbs, gall wasps, dangling weights on a sloping desk, pumice, gesso, dog’s tooth mounted on a handle, miniver / calaber tail hair clippings, dragons’ (and elephants’!) blood, tumsole, sturgeon’s air bladder… enjoy! 🙂

Voynich marginalia: French Secretary hand?

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Following on from yesterday’s post on Elmar’s marginalia PDF, I’ve once again been looking really closely at the Voynich marginalia. I’m using the modern kind of fuzzily-overlapping codicology / palaeography / linguistic methodology that sometimes gets mentioned online (but which may be more to do with university administrators’ desire to collapse three history lecturing posts into one) to try to model the underlying hand, one careful stroke at a time.

f116v-letter-a-analysis

Yesterday, I decomposed the ‘a’ into what I think its constituent strokes are: a curved ‘c’-stroke (red, above) followed by a zigzaggy ‘z’-stroke (blue, above). Now here’s a collection of ‘l’ shapes (and note once again that these are consistent across the various marginalia, just as the “pre-upstroked topless p” marginalia character proved to be back here)…

voynich-marginalia-letter-l

…and the two constituent continuous strokes that I think make up the ‘l’ shape…

voynich-marginalia-letter-l-strokes

My reasoning is; that you can see where the ink pools slightly at the overlap (right at the top); that it’s always easier to do downstrokes than upstrokes with a quill; that the NE-to-SW end part of the second (blue) stroke sometimes crosses over the vertical stroke (most notably in the “por le bon” instance); and that the vertical downstroke seems evenly inked from top to bottom, consistent with a single long stroke.

Similarly, here’s how I think the ‘topless p’ character was stroked, with the second (blue) stroke pushed upwards, which I guess accounts for why it stops short:-

voynich-marginalia-letter-p-strokes

Now, the real question is: how can we use this basic codicological and palaeographic knowledge to help us? Tentatively, I suspect we can now identify the hand as a kind of “French Secretary” hand (as shown on this page on Dianne Tillotson’s excellent site) with perhaps just a hint of Italian mercantesca (as illustrated in this paper by Irene Ceccherini). The two-stroke ‘a’ with a peak-y arch seems quite distinctive: probably the next good step would be looking for old-fashioned palaeography books in Gallica, see what kind of a literature there is on the subject.

Anyway, good luck looking for French Secretary hands with topless p-shapes (but be careful of the keywords you use on Google, you may get something of a high ranking surprise)… 😮

Elmar’s new Voynich marginalia page…

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Self-professed Voynich skeptic Elmar Vogt has been fairly quiet of late: turns out that he has been preparing his own substantial analysis on his “Voynich Thoughts” website of the Voynich Manuscript’s teasingly hard-to-read marginalia, (with Elias Schwerdtfeger’s notes on the zodiac marginalia appended). Given that Voynich marginalia are pretty much my specialist subject, the question I’m sure you want answered is: how did the boy Vogt do?

Well… it’s immediately clear he’s thorough, insofar as he stepped sequentially through all the word-like groups of letters in the major Voynich marginalia to try to work out what each letter could feasibly be; and from that built up a kind of Brumbaugh-like matrix of combinatorial possibilities for each one for readers to shuffle to find sensible-looking readings. However, it also has to be said that for all of this careful (and obviously prolonged) effort, he managed to get… precisely nowhere at all.

You see, we’ve endured nearly a century’s worth of careful, rational people looking at these few lines of text and being unable to read them, from Newbold’s “michiton oladabas“, through Marcin Ciura’s mirrored “sa b’adalo No Tich’im“, and all the way to my own [top line] “por le bon simon sint…“. Worse still, nobody has even been able to convincingly argue the case for what the author(s) was/were trying to achieve with these confused-looking marginalia, which can easily be read as containing fragments of French, Occitan, German, Latin, Voynichese (and indeed of pretty much any other language you can think of).

And the explanation for this? Well, we Voynich researchers simply love explanations… which is why we have so many of them to choose from (even if none of them stands up to close scrutiny):-

  1. Pen trials?
  2. A joke (oh, and by the way, the joke is on us)?
  3. A hoax?
  4. A cipher key?
  5. Enciphered text?
  6. Some kind of vaguely polyglot text in an otherwise unknown language?

How can we escape this analysis paralysis? Where are those pesky intellectual historians when you actually need them?

I suspect that what is at play here is an implicit palaeographic fallacy: specifically the long-standing (but false) notion that palaeographers try to read individual words (when actually they don’t). Individual word and letter instances suffer from accidents, smudges, blurs, deletions, transfers, rubbing off, corrections, emendations: however, a person’s hand (the way that they construct letters) is surprisingly constant, and is normally able to be located within a reasonably well-defined space of historic hands – Gothic, semi-Gothic, hybrida, mercantesca, Humanist, etc. Hence, the real problem here is arguably that this palaeographic starting point has failed to be determined.

Hence, I would say that looking at individual words is arguably the last thing you should be doing: instead, you should be trying to understand (a) how individual letters are formed, and (b) which particular letter instances are most reliable. From there, you should try to categorise the hand, which should additionally give you some clue as to where it is from and what language it is: and only then should you pass the challenge off from palaeography to historical linguistics (i.e. try to read it). And so I would say that attempting to read the marginalia without first understanding the marginalia hand is like trying to do a triple-jump but omitting both the hop and the skip parts, i.e. you’ll fall well short of where you want to get to.

So let’s buck a hundred years’ worth of trend and try instead to do this properly: let’s simply concentrate on the letter ‘a’ and and see where it takes us.

f116v-letter-a

To my eyes, I think that a[5], a[6], and a[7] show no obvious signs of emendation and are also consistently formed as if by the same hand. Furthermore, it seems to me that these are each formed from two continuous strokes, both starting from the middle of the top arch of the ‘a’. That is, the writer first executes a heavy c-like down-and-around curved stroke (below, red), lifts up the pen, places it back on the starting point, and then writes a ‘Z’-like up-down-up zigzaggy stroke (below, blue) to complete the whole ‘a’ shape. You can see from the thickness and shape of the blue stroke that the writer is right-handed: while you can see from the weight discontinuity and slight pooling of ink in the middle of the top line exactly where the two strokes join up. I think this gives us a reasonable basis for believing what the writer’s core stroke technique is (and, just as importantly, what it probably isn’t).

f116v-letter-a-analysis

What this tells us (I think) is that we should be a little uncertain about a[4], (which doesn’t have an obviously well-formed “pointy head”) and very uncertain about a[1], a[2], and a[3] (none of which really rings true).

My take on all this is that I think a well-meaning VMs owner tried hard to read the (by then very faded) marginalia, but probably did not know the language it was written in, leaving the page in a worse mess than what it was before they started. Specifically: though “maria” shouts original to me, “oladaba8” shouts emendation just as strongly. Moreover, the former also looks to my eyes like “iron gall ink + quill”, while the latter looks like “carbon ink + metal nib”.

Refining this just a little bit, I’d also point out that if you also look at the two ascender loops in “oladaba8″, I would argue that the first (‘l’) loop is probably original, while the second (‘b’) loop is structured quite wrongly, and is therefore probably an emendation. And that’s within the same word!

The corollary is simply that I think it highly likely that any no amount of careful reading would untie this pervasively tangled skein if taken at face value: and hence that, for all his persistence and careful application of logic, Elmar has fallen victim to the oldest intellectual trap in the book – of pointing his powerful critical apparatus in quite the wrong direction. Sorry, Elmar my old mate, but you’ve got to be dead careful with these ancient curses, really you have. 🙂

Letters hidden in Voynich plants…

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For years, numerous Voynich researchers have pored over the VMs’ confusing images, hunting for any tiny clues that might possibly be hidden beneath the clumsily-applied paint. And yes, I admit that I’ve done probably more than my fair share of this kind of thing (Curse pp.96-102 stands as testament to this endeavour): so it’s now interesting to hear that René Zandbergen believes that there is “rather strong” evidence (a) that some of the plant parts in the VMs have letters to direct the colouring of that page (let’s follow Vera Segre Rutz and call them “colour annotations“), and (b) that those colour annotations are written in German. Here’s what René says:-

If we go back to the [alchemical herbal] web page of Philip Neal, one of the herbals mentioned there is “Vicenza, Biblioteca Bertoliana MS G.23.2.3 (362) s. 15, Italy and Germany“.

Actually, “G.23.2.3” is the old shelf mark and now it is usually referred to as “Vicenza MS 362“. It’s a 15th century Italian herbal, with illustrations from the alchemical herbal tradition. It also says ‘Germany’ because Segre Rutz in her book quoted by Philip describes that it has ‘colour annotations’ in German. Indeed, in the few illustrations I have from this herbal, you can easily see many occurrences of ‘rot’, ‘gr(ue)n’, ‘gelb’ (red, green, blue) and also ‘erd’ (earth) or ‘weiss’. Additionally it has one illustration with alternating red and green leaves, with alternating single ‘r’ and ‘g’ characters written inside.

These all look extremely similar to the few colour markings in the early quires of the Voynich MS. There’s a clear ‘rot’ in the root of f9v (already seen by many), there’s the ‘g’ in f1v, and then there’s another ‘rot’ with some individual ‘r’s under the paint of the viola tricolor mentioned above, and another ‘g’ to the side of the flower on the right.

Here’s one page of Vicenza MS 362 with ‘rot’ in the root (barely visible in this resolution), while this page has alternating ‘r’ and ‘g’ characters (and the same problem).

Well… the first thing to note is that if Vicenza MS 362 is an Italian herbal with German colour hints, then the same could well be true of the Voynich Manuscript – if we’re talking about a manuscript with depictions of Italian castles (there are actually two sets of swallowtail merlons on the nine rosette page), a provenance that (currently) starts in Prague, and Stolfi’s putative “heavy painter” adding organic-looking paints later in the VMs’ life, then there’s no obvious conflict between the two narratives. All of which begs a whole constellation of questions, such as:-

  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to be colour annotations?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to be written in German?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to have been written by the author?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven not to have been written by the author?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be dated independently of the VMs itself?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to have been written by the author of one of the marginalia?

You already know what I’m going to say: let’s look at the primary evidence for ourselves. With the help of Jon Grove’s clever colour remover plugin (which I recently discovered can work inside IrfanView, a highly recommended hack!), you can make a pretty good stab at seeing past the paint to the letters beneath. Here is an image of what I found when I tried this on the top left flower on f9v (the viola tricolor page I mentioned recently):-

top-left-blue-flower-noblue

Note that even though I tried really quite hard to image process this to a satisfactory state, I didn’t really succeed to the degree that I’d hoped: but still, I think it’s good enough to see that (a) the claim that the top left petal clearly says “rot” doesn’t really hold up; (b) that there are colour annotations in at least three of the five petals in the same hand; and (c) that the colour annotations are even smaller than the Voynichese text.

Let’s move on to the claimed colour annotation in f4r’s root. In “The Curse”, I built a whole cryptogrammatic superstructure on top of my reading of this (rotated) as “TOA”, which is one possibility (though in retrospect, I do see how it seems a little hopeful). However, I also think that reading “rot” here (as a column of letters) is just as hopeful but in a completely different way.

f4r-rot-cropped

However, if you assemble these two (claimed) colour annotations onto the same page and add in the f66r and the f116v marginalia, I think you find something really very surprising indeed:-

voynich-marginalia-link

What I’m claiming is that they all seem to share the same unusual-looking “topless p with a preceding upstroke” first letter (even the supposed “portas” word, which I’ve never believed was the right reading at all). What does it mean? Was all this added by the author or by a later owner?

Update: here’s the leaf Voynichese painted over in f2r René mentions in his comment #1 below (but with the green paint removed), with the rather puzzling EVA “ios.an.on“:-

f2r-leaf-closeup-nogreen

“Love In Idleness” and the VMs…

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This week is “Shakespeare Week” at my son’s school: his year have been allocated A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so get to do their lessons in costume for a day. All of which yielded an ideal family opportunity to break out one of those tediously aspirational The-Bard-For-Kidz boxed sets and run through a heavily abridged version with him to see which character he’d like to play (i.e. which outfit we’d be rapidly constructing). And so Puck it was. 🙂

In business school terms, Oberon and Puck come across to me as an idealized (i.e. pragmatic yet dysfunctional) CEO and CTO pair, i.e. where Puck trolls around the wood trying to implement Oberon’s barking mad strategies. Specifically, Puck drops a tincture of “Love In Idleness” into the eyes of those asleep, confident in the knowledge that they will fall in love with the first person (or indeed donkey) they see when they wake up. With hilarious (and/or dramatic) consequences, etc.

Shakespeare is full of folksy herbal stuff like this: in fact, you don’t have to look very far these days to find academics who argue that the witches in Macbeth were talking about not literally about “eye of newt”, “toe of frog”, and “wool of bat”, but referentially to ‘eye’ plants (such as daisies!), buttercups, and holly leaves respectively, as a humorously winking aside to the audience. If correct, this pitches the witches closer to pantomime dames (such as Nana Knickerbocker, my son’s favourite) than to Cruella De Vil… but I digress!

gigglebiz_nanaknicker_150

Anyway, it turns out that ‘Love In Idleness’ is actually viola tricolor, the purple wild pansy (from which modern pansies were cultivated in the 19th century), A.K.A. ‘heartsease’ and hundreds of other names. Which, of course, is the cue for a picture of the plant on Voynich Manuscript page f9v, for which numerous people have suggested viola tricolor as a good match:-

f9v-viola-detail

As normal, the unsympathetically-applied blue paint looks as though it was added by a later owner’s young child: yet what is strange here is why three of the leaves seems to have had yellow paint added instead (which is what my annoying red arrows are pointing at). If you contrast-enhance the bottom-right flower, you can see this quite clearly:-

f9v-viola-closeup-enhanced

Why was this so? I don’t know, but perhaps that’s not a bad question to be asking. Is that enough random digressions for one day? Probably! 🙂

Filelfo’s 1465 letter to George Amirutzes…

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Art historians have long debated whether or not dissatisfied architect Antonio Averlino made the trip from Italy to Constantinople in 1465: one of the key pieces of evidence supporting the notion is the letter of recommendation written in Greek by Averlino’s old friend Filelfo (the humanist writer and Hellenophile) and addressed to George Amirutzes (Mehmed II’s personal tutor).

This is one of those things that is often referred to fleetingly (such as in my book “The Curse of the Voynich”), but rarely substantively: so I wondered if I could track it down. Handily, Valentina Vulpi’s dissertation had a mini-bibliography for it in footnote 148 on p.47, which directs you to:

  • Finoli & Grassi’s (1972) Italian translation of the libro architettonico, p.XXXIX (in the introduction)
  • Emil Louis Jean Legrand’s (1892) “Cent-dix lettres grecques de Francois Filelfe“, p.120
  • Lavino Agostinelli’s (1899) “Lettere volgarizzate dal greco“, p.86.

Handily, it turns out that Legrand’s book is accessible through Gallica, and here’s a link to the page where the letter transcription begins. The French translation (which you only need a GCSE in Franglais to read) of the Greek goes:-

“Le porteur de la présente lettre, Antoine Averulino, est un homme de bien en même temps qu’un de mes meilleurs amis. C’est pourquoi, en vertu de vieux proverbe, je te le recommande comme étant mon ami, devant être le tien, se trouver ainsi l’ami commun de deux personnes intimeme liées l’une à l’autre. Averulino connaît à merveille une foule d’excellentes choses et est un architecte de très grand talent. Il se rend à Constantinople dans l’unique intention de voir le pays. Tu me feras un sensible plaisir, si tu daignes l’accuellir avec amabilité et lui témoigner toute l’affection que tu as pour moi-même. Porte-toi bien.”

i.e. “He [Averlino] is going to Constantinople with the sole intention of seeing the country” (rather than working as an architect there). However, the last direct record we have of Averlino is from 16th August 1465:

Coram prefatis dominis stipulantibus nomine hospitalis . . . Magister Antonius Florentinus Inzignerius et architector h[ospitalis] novi et magni, cum salario mensuali florinorum XX vigore litterarum ducalium et conventionis per eum habente cum d[ictis] deputatis prout contra in libro conclusionum, liberali annuo et illari vultu manifesta dixit, quod ipso habente solutionem eius quod habere debet ab hospitale ab hodie retro quod eius intentio est, et ita deliberat a modo in antea, quidquid non petere nec habere a dicto hospitale omnis predicti sui salarij, vigore dictarum litterarum et conventionis nec alio jure et predicta atenta inhobilitate [!] hospitalis. Et quod se in futurum fabricari continget in hospitali, quod amore benevolo visitarit laboreria, et nichil pro mercede petet, nisi prout fuerit dispositione dominorum tunc deputatorum.”

Filelfo knew Averlino from at least 1447, when he wrote another letter of recommendation from Milan, this time to Antonio Trebano and dated 26th February 1447: this is discussed in Lazzaroni & Muñoz’s (1908) monograph on Filarete p.110-111, and transcribed in note 26 of Oettingen’s (1888) “Über das leben und die werke des Antonio Averlino: genannt Filarete“, which is available online here. Just to save you the trouble of clicking, Oettingen’s transcription (p.55 of the original, or p.70 of the PDF) reads:-

Francisci Philelfi Epistolarum familiarium libri XXXVII etc., Venetiis 1502, Liber Quintus, fol. 39 v:

Franciscus philelfus. Antonio trebano. sal. – Antonius florentinus, fictor et excussor egregius, aeque tempestate nostra atque praxitelen apud priscos memorant copanve aut phidian aliquem, et te diligit plurimum et mihi est carissimus. Itaque a me petiit, ut te in familiaritatem benevolentiamque acciperem, quippe qui mei studiosissimus sis. Cupere enim se non secus suos amicos omnes fieri meos atque ipse est. Quare ut et homini amicissimo et humanitatis officio satisfacerem, iccirco hasce litteras ad te dedi, ut tibi perpetuo testes essent singularis dilectionis erga te meae. Vale – Ex Mediolano . IIII . Kal . Mart . MCCCC XLVII.”

Fascinatingly, Francesco Filelfo also wrote a later letter to the Sforza ambassador Nicodemo Tranchedini in Florence (on 1st Feb 1466), asking him to pass on a letter to their mutual friend “Antonio architecto“: this is Riccardiana di Firenze MS 834, and is discussed by Maria Beltramini in a 1996 article (which I unfortunately haven’t seen). From this, it seems reasonable to infer not only that Filelfo did indeed expect Averlino to be back from the East within a few months, but also that Averlino had told his old friend he would be returning directly to Florence.

However, there the archival trail goes cold: we don’t have any record of a response from Tranchedini back to Filelfo, though it is entirely possible that such exists – Tranchedini certainly streamed a good volume of enciphered messages back to Francesco Sforza during his many years in Florence, and I don’t know to what extent the remains of these in the Milanese archives have been mined for information.

So… did Averlino make the trip? The only record we have of him past this date is Vasari’s claim that he had allegedly died in Rome in 1469 (and Vasari has proved notoriously unreliable on matters of specific detail). Still… there aren’t any alternative claims, so it seems likely he did die in Italy. There is some contested evidence that places Averlino briefly in Constantinople around this time, so there has to be a reasonably good chance he did make the two-way trip. Everyone seems to be waiting for some slightly more conclusive evidence to surface… but will that ever happen?

Having said that, there are two Quattrocento diaries from Rome that allegedly mention Averlino (but neither of which I’ve yet seen):

  • Iannotii Manetti De vita ac gestis Nicolai quinti summi pontificis, a cura di A. Modigliani, Roma 2005 (Fonti per la Storia dell’Italia Medievale – RIS3, 6) – page 80.
  • La mesticanza di Paolo di Lello Petrone, a cura di F. Isoldi, Città di Castello 1910-1912 (RIS2, 24/2), pp. 1-63 – page 59.

Might these hold a clue? Possibly… (but probably not, alas).