The Voynich manuscript is traditionally divided into a number of sections: one about plants, one about the cosmos, one full of naked women in pools… You know, the usual. But apart from that, it is typically regarded as one “block”, a coherent unit, and there are good reasons to do so:
- The folios are all made of the same kind of material and, apart from the foldouts, have the same dimensions.
- The foldout pages, which are so very unusual in a bound medieval manuscript, appear in various sections.
- The script is the same, which implies that at least the material was created, collected or transcribed by the same person or group. This is a major uniting factor.
- The drawing style appears more or less consistent. Consistently unusual.
The first two points relate to the physical object, and I don’t see any objection to such arguments. It seems clear that those pages we have left were intended to form a unit.
The third point, about the script, is an important one as well. We must keep in mind though, that the script unifies the manuscript on the one hand, but divides it on the other. Various scribal hands have been distinguished in the manuscript, as well as different patterns of text behavior. These were the main discoveries made by captain Prescott Currier when he examined the manuscript back in the seventies:
The two most important findings that I think I have made are the identification of more than one hand and the identification of more than one ‘‘language.’’ The reason they are important is that, if the manuscript were to be considered a hoax as it is by some, it’s much more difficult to explain this if you consider that there was more than one individual involved, and that there is more than one ‘‘language’’ involved. These findings also make it seem much less likely that the manuscript itself is meaningless.[…]
This gives us a total of two ‘‘languages’’ and six to eight scribes (copyists, encipherers, call them what you will)
– Currier in a 1976 seminar (source)
Many current researchers prefer to think of the manuscript as the brain child of one 15th century individual. It is remarkable then that Currier, whose work is generally respected, describes the manuscript as a group effort of up to eight people, and even uses the dreaded c-word: copyists.
In conclusion, if we look at the text in isolation we see unification on the one hand (same unknown script) but a remarkable fragmentation on the other. For this post, it is important to remember that Currier’s conservative estimate was still six (!) different people to do the writing alone.
Of course, to make an illuminated manuscript, you also need illuminations, which must be drawn and painted. Generally a scriptorium would employ several specialists for different parts of the process. If any historian would want to look into the kind of place in which a manuscript like this could have been manufactured, I would be more than interested. But I don’t think it would be an easy task.
Paint
So for the text, we’re looking at six to eight people. How about the painting? In a recent post, J.K. Petersen argued that there would have been at least two different painters involved. Generalizing a bit, one paints smoothly and carefully while the other has a courser style. Additionally, the course painter seems more inclined to use different colors instead of just one shade of green.
In the examples below, the smooth painter would have done the leaf top left. The paint is carefully applied even in the complex edges, and the color is relatively smooth and uniform. The work of the course painter can be admired in the leaves top right.Two or three quick strokes, and the job is done, but on the other hand more different shades are used.
I actually believe that there may be at least one additional distinct style, which is exemplified in the section of a green pool bottom left. This is definitely not the work of the smooth painter, but also not quite that of the course painter. I’d rather call this one the angry painter, since it looks like he attacked the page with a green marker. The picture bottom right shows that also the water has been painted in different styles.
These styles are not intentional “art” choices made by one person. “This water needs to look scratchy, and that water must be smooth”. No, I share JKP’s analysis that these are two – I’d say rather three – different hands. The fact that a same style is usually maintained on the same bifolio indicates to me that it is a result of task division between various persons, not subject-dependent artistic variation by the same person.
So with Currier’s eight different scribes, and let’s say three painters, does that mean eleven people worked on the manuscript? Well I’m not sure. Not all of the painting looks like it’s the work of a specialist – which is something we would expect if separate people did the painting. It’s impossible to tell at this point. An interesting next step would be to see whether different scribal hands match different painter’s hands, but that would take us too far in this post.
Drawings
All of this was an introduction to what I thought would be a short post about imagery. If there are different hands in the text and different hands in the paint, then what about the drawings?
Comparing drawing styles is tricky. There are two main problems, of which the first one is easy to demonstrate. Consider the following set of details from various sections of the manuscript.
Are those things drawn by the same person? Would you even put them in the same manuscript together if you didn’t know? That’s the first problem: how can we know if hundreds of plants and hundreds of weird naked ladies are drawn by the same person? And what about the many round charts? That is the first problem when comparing drawing style, the matter in the manuscript is just too different.
The second problem is a bit more complex. I personally follow Diane O’Donovan’s argument that the imagery in the manuscript has Hellenistic roots, and that the various sections reached medieval Europe through different routes. This means that the copyists who first unified the material were confronted with a range of art styles. But even if one believes the images in the manuscript are medieval European creations, the standard would still be that at least part of them were copied from various sources rather than invented on the spot. In other words, no matter how we look at it, there would have been stylistic variation in the “input” imagery, possibly resulting in stylistic variation in the artefact we have at our disposal.
We must keep this in mind: any stylistic variation might be the result of different source material, different draughtsmen, or both. Let’s have a look at some examples.
Compare the following faces. The first row consists of faces of various celestial bodies from the Cosmological section.Even though one is drawn at a different angle, we see a very similar style. A bit of a snub nose, eyes are drawn with separate pupils, mouth consists of two lines. These faces are larger than the other ones in the manuscript though, so some of this may be the result of the available space.
The second row consists of all the human figures in the central emblems of the Zodiac section. Mouths are colored red and a blush has been applied on the cheeks, though this may have been the work of a different person. And finally the third row, these are faces from some of the circular diagrams. I would be inclined to see a difference here, especially in the shape of the face, but it is hard to be certain.
However, if we compare a delegation of these first faces to some new ones from quire 13b, a clear difference emerges. The first row is from the Zodiac and Cosmological sections, the second and third row from quire 13b:
Especially in row two, the figures have been made ugly and deformed. It still remains unclear whether this is really because of a different hand, or a different kind of source image, or a different purpose…. but one thing is certain: the style is different. Similar enough to know that they are from the same manuscript, but different enough to know that something is going on. If one still wishes to argue that all figures have been drawn by the same person without copying sources, then one must explain why so many nymphs in quire 13b have horribly deformed faces.
Finally, there are two large faces in the roots of a plant on f33r. They look again as if they were drawn by a different hand, perhaps the same one that drew the faces on the suns and moons, but definitely not the one that drew the nymphs’ faces. The flat S-curve of the nose, the way the pupils and eyes are drawn, two lines for the mouth. The hair is drawn in a more basic, crude way than is the case in the other sections.
Much more can be said about variation in the drawing, but this post is getting a bit too long for my liking. I will just add two more examples.
What I find the most remarkable is that often the animal shapes hidden in plants are drawn more accurately than the “normal” animals in the manuscript. I have often mentioned that there is a wonderful elephant head hidden in one of the leaves, for example:
Or an anatomically correct octopus – for being a plant, that is:
A decent squid:
A rearing cobra:
And so on. If we compare this to the “overt” animals in the manuscript, it’s a bit of a hit and miss situation, depending on the section. There are some decent birds in the cosmological section, but it’s all downhill from there.
And it doesn’t stop with the animal shapes. For example, one of the small plants has a hand for a root. Yeah just that. The thing is, this hand is actually anatomically correct and even somewhat elongated, unlike any other hand in the manuscript. A quick comparison:
So it seems like especially the hidden images in the small-plants section have been drawn with more accuracy than their overt counterparts in other sections. Add to that the different overall stylistics, like an elongated hand compared to stumpy pseudo-hands, and the case for different artists becomes stronger. Though here, again, one might argue that different sources caused the differences in stylistics. Or both. But we must stop considering the manuscript the invention of one man, because it clearly isn’t.
The Voynich Temple 
Excellent analysis! To my eye, the different writing styles are much more unalike than the drawing styles you have highlighted, but I am no artist …
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Thanks, JB! One thing to keep in mind is that the drawings may have been copied, just like Currier seems to have deemed possible about the text. If there was a common ‘draft’ for example, then differences would be subtle. It would indeed be helpful to have a skilled artist look at the drawings.
Either way, the difficulty remains that any difference in drawing style may be explained by the different character of the various sections.
It’s also a matter of experience. If you present a random nymph to any researcher who specialises in the imagery, I think they will be able to tell you which section it came from just by picking up on subtle stylistic differences. At least that’s my impression, I’m curious to know what the others think.
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Very interesting, Koen. This is an aspect of the manuscript that fascinates me and yet I haven’t had time to explore the details of the drawing styles, so it was fun to read about it.
In your 4 x 3 nymph grid, the second row clearly has zombie-like blank eyeballs, in contrast with some of the other eyeball styles, and a peculiar way of trying to draw the forehead.
Even though there are stylistic differences, I can’t help wondering, at times, if this is a family project. There are clearly multiple hands in the text and the illustrations, and yet there is also a certain similarity in parts that appear to be by different hands. Either it was a group accustomed to cooperative tasks or perhaps members of an extended family.
Also, there are parts of the manuscript where I wonder if the nymphs are modeled on real people (as opposed to imaginary or mythical ones), perhaps in a satirical way, but it’s very hard to tell without firm details about the manuscript’s intent or specific geographical origin.
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It was much harder than I first thought since there are so mamy variables into account. I have also thought that if one wants to defend the idea that the imagery was not faithfully copied from an exemplar, there is only one option left. Like you say, to think in terms of people with the same training working closely together.
Since I do think that at least the images are copies from an earlier composition, it is easier to account for the similar-yet-dissimilar impression one keeps getting. But that still doesn’t explain why the work was done by more than two people. I thought that generally a manuscript was copied by one person for each task, unless the first one died. But here we get the impression that bifolios were divided between various people…
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Hmm, I’d always figured that one person did all of the human faces, since the style is broadly the same, but I think you may have a point here, especially with regard to the faces in the roots of 33r.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that, if we assume that the VMS is a copy, then we essentially have two separate questions: whether there was more than one person involved in producing this copy, and whether there were multiple influences in the original.
That there were multiple influences in the original I have no doubt. Even just within the plants, we can see that most of Herbal B is in a quite different style from anything in Herbal A. The Zodiac emblems also seem to have had a separate source from anything else in the manuscript as we’ve talked about before. The apparently disparate origins of different elements in the source imagery makes it a bit difficult to judge the number of people involved in the copying.
I’ve gone back and forth a number of times on whether there are multiple hands in the text, though now I mostly think there were at least two people involved, but it’s difficult to determine exactly how many were involved or to produce a complete classification of the pages (which is probably why apparently nobody since Currier has done this, and in fact nobody seems to have even tried to verify his classification scheme). If there were multiple scribes, they obviously were trained to write the script in a very similar way, so while the overall impression one gets from looking at the text is that the handwriting differs it’s difficult to identify specific details that can be used to produce a “rigorous” classification.
Despite what Currier believed, I think the differences in text properties that can be observed in different portions of the text (including even properties like the number of words per line) have nothing to do with the number of scribes (since I think they were merely copyists). To the extent that hands and text properties might be correlated, this could be explained by a division of the copying task along the same lines that the content itself is divided (i.e. one person does Herbal B, another person Bio, etc.)
There was almost certainly more than one person involved in adding the colors, and the materials used themselves seem to have been somewhat diverse, which could indicate that the colors were done over a period of time, but I still think the colors must all basically be “original” (i.e. the people who added them had access to the original manuscript and used it as a model).
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I’ve also grown more certain that like 95% of the color is authentic. Maybe even all of it but I keep some reservation about some thick paint in the Zodiac section.
Obviously I also think the imagery is copied, which does complicate matters. But all in all I don’t find it extremely important to know whether it was done by one person or more. I mostly want to point out the problems with thinking in terms of a single 15th century creative author.
Another question altogether though, is when the text was added and when it took its current form. I cannot exclude the possibility that what we see now is the result of a 15th century transcription.
Do Currier’s language match the different hands? Because in that case it seems almost inevitable to assume that the transcription was done in the 15th century and that one person transcribed differently than the other.
Or do you think this script was already present in their exemplars and they divided the task among themselves depending on the “language”? Or perhaps that they divided along sections and a divide in languages was a consequence of that? All possibilities would lead to some very interesting conclusions.
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I’d say the hands correlate with the different sections somewhat. Herbal B seems to have the most distinctive handwriting, but it differs from the other B sections as much as it does from the A sections. There’s also some variation within Herbal A, I think. The whole issue of hands needs to be studied in more depth before any conclusions can really be drawn from it. I don’t think we can rely on what Currier thought, and like you said, most likely all we’ll learn from it is how the copying work was divided up, and not much about the origin or meaning of the content.
It seems the text must have been transcribed from some other script into the script we see in the VMS now if we accept the following three points as true:
1) The VMS script has been strongly influenced by medieval Latin conventions
2) The illustrations mostly have a pre-medieval origin
3) The text was already associated with the illustrations when they were first composed
In other words, if the text existed before the middle ages, then it must have been written in some other script.
A few things though. First, the script is medieval but I don’t think it’s 15th century German. I think “Tavola IV” from Cappelli is probably pointing us in the right direction, and it’s a 12th century Italian document. So probably the transcription occurred around that time and place (possibly a bit later), and then the person or group who later produced the VMS only copied a document that had already been transcribed.
Second, I don’t think the different “languages” can possibly be the result of differing transcription schemes. The rules on how glyphs are arranged in sequence to form words, along with many of the words themselves, are the same in both A and B sections. Therefore the text seems to have been transcribed uniformly (I imagine something like a glyph-for-glyph substitution), and the different properties of the different sections are just an intrinsic property of the text that was presumably already there in the earlier stages.
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Yes, this seems most likely to me as well. There has been a Medieval “composition” of what we see now, which likely involved gathering the material and transcribing the original text from whatever form it was in originally. I’m not sure if anything in the current manuscript demands a post-12th century explanation (apart from of course practical items like quire numbers etc)..
But let’s assume that everything was copied from a 12th century composition. Wouldn’t it be weird then if different Currier languages match different scribal hands?
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The only thing the 15th century copyists seem to have changed is the clothing styles, most notably reflected in Sagittarius with his crossbow (if we count the crossbow as a kind of “fashion accessory”).
It would be interesting to find out how early the swallowtail merlons could have entered the picture. Apparently these have never been found in a 15th century German manuscript, so I assume that they were also part of an earlier Italian stage in the transmission process. Would 12th century have been too early?
I don’t really think it’s that weird if the different scribal hands coincide with different text properties because:
1) They don’t really seem to match perfectly
2) The text properties cluster by section, and it’s quite plausible that the copying task was divided up by sections as well
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Just a note about the ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ painter(s). Between 2008 and c.2013 or so, I don’t recall anyone paying this sort of thing the slightest attention apart from Nick Pelling. I’m sure he’d correct me if I tried to credit him wrongly with first noting this, as with trying to get people to pay attention to hands and codicology etc. It was then picked up and versions put on various websites, to varying degrees. But I feel that it has thus been made mainstream but in the meantime Pelling supposed just one more of many. It’s quite otherwise. I think perhaps he first identified the ‘heavy’ from the ‘light’ painter. I’m no fan of his Averlino theory, and so forth. But I’d not like to see his original and lasting contributions taken up, but his name forgotten.
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