Jan Brueghel the Elder’s telescopes…

by ⋅ 4 Comments

A short note just arrived from Enrique Joven, concerning a recent talk he attended at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) by Dr. Paolo Molaro from the Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste: “On the invention of the telescope and the paintings of Jan Brueghel”

Jan Brueghel depicted telescopes in four paintings spanning the period between 1609 and 1621. We have investigated the nature and the origin of these telescopes. An optical “tube” that appears in the painting dated 1608-1612, and probably reproduced also in a painting of the 1621, represents one the earliest documentation of a Dutch spyglass which could even tentatively attributed to Sacharias Janssen or Lipperhey, thus prior to those made by Galileo. Other two instruments made of several draw-tubes which appear in the two paintings of 1617 and 1618 are quite sophisticated for the period and we argue that may represent early examples of Keplerian telescopes.

Molaro is (of course) referring to Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625): before this, I had only heard of the telescope in the series of paintings Brueghel executed with Rubens (which is now in the Prado), so I look forward to reading more about the other depictions of telescopes, particularly the earliest of the set. Here’s a tiny version of the 1617 painting:-

brueghel_sight_small

Just in case you haven’t got a CSI-style ‘infinite enhance‘ button in your web browser 🙂 , here’s a slightly more helpful close-up of the shiny multiple-draw-tube telescope depicted just to the left of the front centre:-

brueghel_telescope

Incidentally, Molaro had done a similar presentation at IAU-UNESCO Symposium 260 in Paris a few days before (“Early telescopes in the paintings of Jan Brueghel”). To my surprise, Enrique mentioned that my Juan Roget theory was mentioned in one of Molaro’s slides: how nice to find out that people are actually listening!

Now that I have read about it, Google tells me about Pierluigi Selvelli’s poster session “On the Telescopes in the Painting of Bruegel ‘The Vision’” at the September 2008 “400 years of Astronomical Telescopes” conference at ESA/ESTEC in Noordwijk. Doubtless this all forms part of the same study, and I can’t wait to find out more…

Many artists of the time were fascinated by the telescope: Google also tells me that influential Rome-based painter Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) corresponded with Galileo about telescopes through an intermediary.

As an aside, Vincent Ilardi’s “Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes”  mentions four works by Pieter Brueghel the Elder that depict spectacles, all apparently showing the spectacle-wearers in a negative light. Errrm… not a lot of people know that. 🙂

* * * * * *

Article update: following my post, Giancarlo Truffa very kindly emailed the HAstro-L mailing list with the names of all four Brueghel pictures studied by Paolo Molaro, together with links to online versions of them. And here they are…

  1. “Archduke Albert observing Mariemont Castle“, 1608-1611, Richmond (VA), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
  2. “The Sense of Sight” (with Peter Paul Rubens), 1617, Madrid, Museo del Prado, 65 x 109 cm
  3. “The Sense of Sight and Smell“, c.1620, Madrid, Museo del Prado, 176 x 264 cm
  4. “Allegory of Air” (with Peter Paul Rubens), 1621, Paris, Musee du Louvre, 45 x 65 cm

Enjoy! 🙂

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 Beale Papers Theory…

by ⋅ 17 Comments

Word arrives at Mysteries Mansion from “Fred Jones / Will Smith” about his/her shiny new Beale Papers theory: “Yes the codes are broken! I am giving them out free for all to see at http://www.bealetreasurecodes.com ”

As everyone knows, Part 2 was decoded in the original 1885 pamphlet (though the precise details of how the decoder silently worked past where the encoder misnumbered the words in the Declaration of Independence text have caused a fair few modern cryptologists to suspect the whole thing might be some kind of hoax): but what of Parts 1 and 3? You know, the bits that say where the treasure is hidden. 🙂

If you hack through all the foliage (Jefferson? Templars? What?), Jones/Smith’s claim is that if you apply a modified part of the plaintext of Part 2 to the first few lines of Part 1 (so that “71, 194, 38, 1701, 89, 76, 11, …” maps to “INTHECOUNTYOFBEDFORDABOUTFOURMILESAQUADRANTAWAYFROMBUFORD” you get some kind of cunning mix of French and English fragments in the remainder, which (once he’s filled in the gaps) he claims reads as follows:-

In the county of bedford about four miles a quadrant away from buford then here by ahan need ban o tug de a tac foam ruth ci in en but heath narrow mount tut by aire aid t blockade utterly the lentuer stagnation defunt having hag note aerial sa middle ninth bar …

Ohhhhkayyyy… it’s at this point I throw my hands up in the air and simply point out that this looks not entirely dissimilar to Levitov’s VMs descryption (and, though GC will disagree, to Leonell Strong’s claimed VMs decryption too) – a kind of polyglot mishmash of language-like fragments, not unlike hurling a bowl’s worth of Alphabetti Spaghetti at a wall and trying to piece together the resultant letter gloop into sentence-like things. Oh well…

Smith/Jones has put up two (quite big) pages already with more planned over the next few days/weeks: perhaps he/she will have plenty of surprises for us for Part 3. We shall see!

The Voynich “Apollo” sun…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

Edith Sherwood recently flagged the “sun-face” at the middle of f68v1 as being a representation of Apollo, and that this “could indicate an association with Roman mythology“. Certainly, the face is tilted slightly upward and is linked with the sun, both features you might (naively, iconologically) expect to point to Apollo. If only Voynich research was that simple! Let’s start by taking a look at the sun-face in context, in particular the paints….

f68v1-highlighted

Here, the red-coloured contact transfer (from f69r) at the bottom left clearly happened after the pages were rebound in the wrong order [f68v1’s “sun-face” initially sat beside f67r1’s “moon-face”], bringing to my mind the bloodstain imagined on the Sarajevo Haggadah by Geraldine Brooks in her novel “People of the Book” (which I’ll review here shortly). There are also “blue-edge” paint transfers (also from f69r) at 11.30, 12.00, 3.00, and 3.30, as well as some contact-transferred green “pipe-ends” at 10.30, 11, and 1 o’clock.

Given that the dirty black-blue paint on f68v1 appears to be identical to the one used on f69r, it seems extremely likely to me that the blue and green paints on both pages were later additions, whereas f68v1’s far paler yellow paint (which is covered over by the blue in a number of places) gives the distinct impression of being original. The ‘alpha’ (i.e. original) state of the page was therefore very likely to be just the drawings and the yellow paint only. If you snip away all the distracting blue paint in a a picture editor, you’d get something like this:-

sun-face-alpha

With all the distracting blue paint removed, we can start to see more clearly what was being drawn. For instance, we can see the lines marking the front and back of the neck: and once we see those, we can see the wobbly line marking the back of the head (inside the circle). However, this appears to me to go over the dotted “headband” – and so the headband was apparently drawn first.

There is also a curious small loop where the head’s left ear would be, partially disguised by the rays, which I find reminiscent of the kind of stubby metal loops you see on astrolabes.

I therefore argue that this codicological evidence suggests that the alpha state of the image was probably a circle with a dotted arc that has been made to look as though it is a headband (when a face was added) – and so I would say that any resemblance to Apollo is very probably incidental to the real meaning of the page.

Dotted lines seem to have a particular resonance for the VMs’ author in several other places, and I have long suggested that these might very well indicate that meaningful information has been visually encoded. My guess here is that this was the briefest of sketches to allude to some kind of 15th century solar instrument – not an astrolabe, but something broadly similar.

To me, all this exemplifies the problem with looking for iconographic matches on the VMs’ sleek surface: in most cases, the basic codicological study (that ought to precede any searching for meaning) seems not to have been done – far too often, people skip to the chase without really looking at the page first.

Oh well! 😮

Wall-E and the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ 5 Comments

Last weekend, it was too cold to go swimming without an ice-pick, so I took my young son to see the Disney Pixar film “Wall-E” (he already had the matching underpants, so what the hey). The cinema presentation was preceded by an interminably long advert for Butlins holiday camps: I found this rather amusing given that (in the film) the people on the spaceship Axiom have spent 700 years laying around a lido sipping drinks while their bones shorten and their muscles atrophy. Kewl.

But anyway, is there any link between Wall-E and the Voynich Manuscript?, I hear you yell. Put down those tomatoes, I’m gettin’ to it, I’m gettin’ to it… There are plenty of ways of reading Pixar’s (actually rather good) film, from a moralistic eco-parable (which some games-industry friends of mine find hilarious, given that they did the programming for a WALL-E plastic toy), to “Robots In Love” (my personal favourite). But given that little WALL-E has amused himself (possibly for centuries?) by kicking off his caterpillar treads at the end of each working day and watching a fading VHS video of Michael Crawford in “Hello Dolly!”, the film is arguably more about a kind of romantic musical cargo cult – how obsessive devotion to a single cultural object taken out of context can produce jarringly odd behaviour.

In those terms, perhaps all traditional Voynich researchers are Wall-E, holed up after work in their suburban dens, overcompensating for existential emptiness with devotion to a practically non-existent cause, where their hunt for meaning in the (also nearly 600-year-old!) Voynich Manuscript is broadly as far-fetched a cargo cult as Wall-E’s hunt for robotic musical love within the reference frame of “Hello Dolly!”

At least humour me, and say that you can see the romance in both quests. 🙂

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). 🙂

Jens Sensfelder crossbow article…

by ⋅ 7 Comments

Elmar Vogt just posted a page with scans of René Zandbergen’s translation (from German to English) of Jens Sensfelder’s (2003) short article on the crossbowman in the Voynich Manuscript to his blog: but as I had the original HTML [though no pictures] lurking on my hard drive, I thought I ought to post it here as well (as they say in the Caribbean, is nice to be nice).

So here, for the benefit of infinitii and others, is Jens Sensfelder’s crossbow article. Enjoy!

Bellaso’s ciphers, updated…

by ⋅ 4 Comments

A huge thanks to the indefatigable Tony Gaffney who very kindly took the time recently to double-check my transcriptions (some of them derived from Augusto Buonafalce’s transcriptions) of Bellaso’s various challenge ciphers against the copies held in the British Library.

Of the twelve corrections he suggested, roughly half were typos on my part, while the remainder were places where I had transcribed punctuation-like marks (but which were instead simply marks added incidentally as part of the printing).

I’m reasonably sure that the (corrected) Bellaso cipher page here now holds a pretty close, multiply-eyeballed set of transcriptions: so what are you waiting for, go and crack them! 🙂

German zodiac woodcuts…?

by ⋅ 7 Comments

My last post on Elmar Vogt’s new blog received a comment from infinitii, asking me for the source for the suggestion that the zodiac motifs may have been copied from a (possibly 14th century) German woodcut calendar. I had long forgotten the story’s origin, but a quick grep through the VMs mailing list archives (the ones before 2002 that aren’t yet on the web) turned up what seems to be the key thread.

Jorge Stolfi began (29Dec2000):-

In the meantime, I remembered I had seen something like the VMS Sagittarius somewhere in the astrological books. And I have found it on the Web – have a look at:

  http://www.englib.cornell.edu/mhh4/planets/jupiter.html

This is from an early (15th c.) German “Planets’ Children” blockbooks (the planets’ children theme was also found in some of the Books of Hours – eg. the most beautiful one of Duc de Berry). The crossbow man looks *very much* like the VMS Sagittarius to me. Also note that the actual Sagittarius in a small circle at the feet of Jupiter above is represented as a man – not a traditional centaur (even though he holds a standard bow).

I think this confirms the 15th c. German origin as stated by Panofsky (a great authority, after all) – at least until a better argument is put forward (I am not convinced by the humanist hand argument and still less by the other Italian origin arguments recently presented by Dana – people were coming to study in Italy from all over Europe and thus
were heavily influenced by Renaissance culture and art).

Rene Zandbergen then replied (30Dec2000) to the last two paragraphs:-

Yes, very ‘block book’ and very German. In Saxl’s ‘Verzeichniss’ other nice examples can be seen.

I’m not yet ready to decide. Is the theme German and the execution Italian? Or in the block book, where the execution is German, the theme of the planets’ children was widespread. The profusely illustrated but otherwise only moderately useful book ‘Alchemie & Mystik’ by Alexander Roob gives a lot of nice examples.

Jorge Stolfi continued (30Dec2000):-

What I meant is that the crossbow man really looks like the VMS Sagittarius and that I have not seen that sign represented by a man rather than a centaur elsewhere. Are there any examples of non-German non-centaur Sagittarius?

Rene Zandbergen responded (30Dec2000):-

He does indeed. I found out I have copies of some illustrations from the same block book (in German) but these are not including Sagittarius.

Certainly, there are German Sagitarii which _are_ centaurs, but that doesn’t really help. I’ll scan a few nice images from a book called ‘Flores Albumasaris’ printed in Augsburg around 1480. They’re woodcuts but allow a nice comparison with some of the VMs images. Sagittarius is a Centaur here.

Then there’s a brief lull, until Rafal Prinke continues the thread (09 Jan 2001) with a number of closely related art historical bombshells:-

I have received a very kind and informative reply from Prof. Ewa Sniezynska-Stolot of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (my repeated apologies to the list I had not written to her earlier). Below is a translation/summary of her letter.

——————————–

I have inspected the VMS at Beinecke. The signs of the Zodiac do not present problems – they are simply not of the Arateia type but were modernized. As I wrote in my books, because of linguistic mistakes and changes in artistic styles, human figures were represented in contemporary garments (viz. Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius). Attributes were changed in the same way, eg. Sagittarius’ bow developed into a crossbow in the 15th c.

The genre scenes, eg. Aries eating a bush, suggest that the signs were redrawn from a calendar. Garments: the jopulas [?] of men with a belt suggest the 14th/15th c. but headdresses of men (Gemini, Sagittarius) definitively indicate the 15th c. This was common fashion in Europe at that time. The Sagittarius’ cap with fox tail points to Germany – but they were also worn in Poland. I believe that the manuscript can be dated
to mid-15th c. From the astrological iconography point of view, the Taurus at a well is somewhat strange – unless an image of donkeys was a basis for it and then it would refer
to Cancer – but that is certainly going too far.

In my opinion it is a notebook of a liberal arts student. Similar notebooks are Beinecke 225 and 226. The former belonged to Paul de Worczin who studied in Cracow in 1422
(according to the Beinecke catalogue Cracow is in Bohemia!). The latter is also from Cracow.

In our Institute we have a database with descriptions of most of existing medieval zodiacal iconography. I am now preparing a similar database of the iconography of
individual degrees of the Zodiac.

————————————–

Thus she confirms the opinion of Panofsky (and my own amateurish feeling) that the VMS should be dated to mid-15th Germany/Poland/Bohemia.

The suggestion that it is a student’s notebook is a bit of a revelation to me! Drawing naked ladies and fantastic pipelines during boring lectures is perhaps what they were doing from the dawn of time.

Prof. Sniezynska-Stolot has not addressed the VMS script but I hope to keep in contact with her. Maybe that was some kind of a medieval “beta-kappa” students’ corporation fun popular in Cracow and there are loads of similar manuscripts at the Jagiellonian Library?

Here’s a picture of a [modern] jopula (no, I didn’t know what it was either): basically, it’s a 14th/15th century outer garment made of four pieces plus sleeves, something like a doublet. Looks quite snug! 🙂

Rene Zandbergen picked up on the Sagittarius crossbowman’s hat’s fox tails (11Jan2001):-

Brumbaugh always made a point of stressing that this was a Florentine archer’s hat. Guess in whose opinion I put more trust.

Rafal Prinke then made a related calendaric aside (13Jan2001):

There were 3 styles of beginning the year in March:

1) Venetian – 1st March
2) Florentine and Pisan – 25th March (with a year’s difference)
3) Gallic – Easter Sunday (ie. not always in March)

The Venetian style was also used in Ruthenia (but not in Poland, which used exclusively Christmas and 1st January, along with Germany, Bohemia and Sweden). Russia changed to the Byzantine style in 1492 (1st September), also used in other Orthodox countries and in southern Italy.

The Florentine style was used in England, while the Gallic style – in France and the Netherlands.

So – if we accept the calendaric basis for the VMS Zodiac, it points either to Venice (and thus Northern Italy, which is the favoured hypothesis now) or pre-1492 Ruthenia, which might suggest further possibilities of a connection with Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian, Armenian or Turkish influences on the VMS script and content.

Incidentally, I should also flag this as a good example of how a single small thread in the VMs mailing circa 2000 typically contained more effort, historical research, genuine collaboration and reflective thought than entire months of postings there do now. People sometimes think that I’m perhaps being nostalgic or unrealistic when I talk of the decline of the list: but sadly it’s a very real phenomenon.