I came across something which I consider of high importance for learning where the Voynich Manuscript was made.
Crossed arms
Back in 2016 I noticed that the VM Gemini had their arms crossed, almost like they were trying to do a double handshake. In standard Gemini imagery a man and woman can be seen in an embrace, but never quite of this kind. At this point, the only approximation I had found was in depictions of Roman marriage. The pair would hold each others’ right hand, and with his left the man would give an item to the woman. The images don’t quite capture the double handshake, but the seed is there. Various examples remain, and they all follow the same principles.
Examples in astronomy
At the time I started thinking about the meaning of the crossed arms, the most fertile discussion about Gemini imagery was taking place on Stephen Bax’ site, in an article (October 2015) by Darren Worley and Marco Ponzi. Darren had found the most convincing parallel thus far in a mid-15th century southern German manuscript, Pal. Lat. 1369.
Now in hindsight it is clear to me that this image is also descendant of wedding imagery. Look at the woman’s hand: it’s attached to her right arm, but it looks more like a floating left hand. It also looks like the copyist had no proper example for her other hand. This makes perfect sense now: originally this was a “double handshake” wedding ceremony image, which got awkwardly adapted (or misunderstood) into a pair holding hands at shoulder level.
The first example of proper crossed arms I found was in Reg. Lat. 1324, in a planisphere. Since planisphere images are by tradition mirrored, I present the comparison in mirrored form:
I have little doubt that the planisphere figures were taken from an example where they were dressed. The man’s front foot is shaped like a typical medieval pointed shoe. The placement of the handshake arms is excellent, but a mistake was made in the ring arms. The man touches the woman’s elbow and the she touches his nipple. This implies that the double handshake pose was misunderstood. Still, this 15th century French or Italian manuscript remains one of the most relevant sources since it shows the “wedding” pair in a constellation context. I wonder what their clothes looked like before they took them off.
The turning point
That was all in 2016. It was only a few days ago that I found an image which shifted my view on the matter. It is from a 1482 German printed book. Since the image is a woodcut, I will mirror it for proper comparison.
The hand are precisely like they are in the VM Gemini. However, this image has nothing to do with astronomy, astrology or calendars. It is from a book about courtly love, an extremely popular theme in 15th century manuscripts.
Something similar to the Roman wedding ceremony was still customary in medieval times, and images are plenty. In what follows, I will simplify a bit: I will talk about weddings, even though a similar ceremony was used for betrothals – the difference is irrelevant for us since it looks the same. And I’ll call the instances where all four hands touch a “double handshake” even though it technically isn’t – as I will now explain.
The type of medieval marriage we’re interested in is as follows: the man and woman hold one hand (in cross, so left to left or right to right) and with his free hand, the man puts a ring on a finger of the woman’s free hand. This results in the “double handshake” look. The “passive” set of hands is usually pictured below, while the putting on of the ring is above. Many images focus on the handshake, this example from 1380 France:
And others only show the ring:
Diebold Lauber
As an example of how existing compositions and individual figures were recycled over and over again, here are some examples from various manuscripts from the workshop of Diebold Lauber, which will turn out to be crucial for us. It was one of the most famous places of 15th century German manuscript production, active from ca. 1425 to 1470. However, stylistically its images are said to follow 14th century examples. The following examples are from three different manuscripts; note how the same stock images are used, altered just enough to suit the context. There are many more examples than what I can show here.
In other words, these are the tricks of mass production. In an example from yet another manuscript, things take a turn for the absurd. We see Percival in the “wedding pose” with a noblewoman whom he just humiliated by defeating (not killing) her husband in combat. They don’t like each other at all and there is no intention of marriage. Yet the illustrator still used the wedding template (because hey, it’s a man and a woman right?) and conveyed the grief of the scene only in their facial expression.
I have included the Voynich version of the template because again I want you to get a feeling for what’s going on here. It’s the same image, just adapted for a different purpose. In Parcifal, you can even see how the woman presents her finger for a ring, and the man still has his hand as if holding an invisible object. Obviously there is no ring, because they are not getting married. But the image is the same, turbans included. The man active, woman passive. Crossed arms.
Okay, now go back to the previous image, the one with four fragments. One of these is of immense importance for our purpose, especially if you look at the man.
I’ll give you a moment.
It’s an illustration of Rudolf von Ems’ work Wilhelm von Orlens from the MS Den Haag, KB, 76 E 1 (Werkstatt Diebold Lauber, 1448-1450) In this picture we see the Wilhelm from the title together with princess Amelie. According to the Wiki, they were among the most famous lovers of the Middle Ages, but I must admit I did not know them. Anyway, the illustrator uses a very clear form of the “wedding” template, although the arms are uncrossed.
Now, mentally remove the red carpet the man is using as a coat. Let’s look at the individual details.
Green turban, ugly haircut, long neck, laced boots. It’s the same guy
There is an earlier Wilhelm von Orlens manuscript made in 1420 in the “Werkstatt von 1418“, a name for a group of related manuscripts seen as the predecessors of Lauber’s work. However, it is different in style and there is no clear “wedding pose” image. But there is this this image of the protagonist holding hands with a robed man:
All in all, Diebold Lauber’s version appears much closer to that in the VM.
What to do next?
There’s a clear path of investigation to follow now, and I hope the power of the Voynich community might shine here. Lauber is a bit late, but he does seem to have had access to sources extremely close to those of the VM Gemini. The next step, in my opinion, would be the following: there are many manuscript families which feature these stock images, some of which were quite popular. We should make an overview of these and see if we can trace any transmission of the forms. Since the VM features a wealthy couple, the best candidates are manuscripts about courtly love, proper behavior of nobility and so forth.
EDIT 4 September 2018: while studying the evolution in their clothing, I noticed a parallel with Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, which shows a change in fashion. Note how Van Eyck and Lauber share fur coat, V-neck, fur on the hem of the woman’s dress.
Taking all this into account, it looks like Lauber’s image was taken from a source more like the VM than the 1420 example. However, by 1448 the preference for rich clothing had changed, possibly influenced by artists like Van Eyck or, more likely, a change in clothing preferences. What would Panofsky say?
FOOTNOTES
[1] See http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/de/bpd/glanzlichter/oberdeutsche/lauber.html for info about the workshop (in German).
Discussion on Stephen Bax’ site: https://stephenbax.net/?p=1682#comment-164961
See https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-591-post-22074.html#pid22074 for the discussion on the Voynich ninja forum.
The Voynich Temple 
Spontaneously I have to think of the “Codex Manesse” (Cod. Pal. Germ. 848), for example folio 110 r.
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I’ve spent quite a few years trying to find out more about the forerunner to the Lauber studio (which may have been run by Lauber’s uncle or father, or maybe someone in the same Schilling family that became more strongly involved in the later Lauber studio) but there is unfortunately very little information about it.
However, if you look at this post from January 2016:
https://voynichportal.com/2016/01/25/sirens-and-sailors-and-the-lovely-melusina/
Near the bottom , you will see some parallels between the palettes used in some of the Diepolt Lauber works and the VMS pond critters (one in particular). What is significant about the pond creature (besides the palette and the painted-over tail) is that the person had difficulty drawing hind limbs (as is glaringly true of many of the animals in the VMS and which is not typical of most medieval animal drawings).
It’s not the same illustrator, but it is similar style and content… the VMS is just less competently drawn.
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This lends some support to the parallels you posted above, and, in combination with a number of other zodiacs, and some of the paleographic and foliation data, certainly adds a few more pins to this part of the map.
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Also on a related note, the earliest zodiac I’ve been able to find that might be interpreted as more romantic (not crossed arms, but more intimate than most earlier depictions) is in Walters MS W.26 (the Claricia Psalter). It has many parallels to the VMS: leg-tail Leo, long-necked Aries and Taurus, dragony Scorpio, human Sagittarius and no-figure Libra. Morgan M.729 isn’t quite as close (Sagittarius is a satyr) but the Gemini couple seem almost about to kiss, and the Pisces fish have double sets of fins, long noses, and full scales. It is from Amiens, France. In BNF NAF 4600 (France) and Getty MS. 34 (Bologna) they are embracing and definitely kissing—a later 14th-century transition from brotherly love to courtly love.
The Claricia Psalter originates somewhere in or near Augsburg. Since it was commissioned, it may even have come from one of the earlier workshops farther south or west. It ended up in the hands of a French artist who fled France to Switzerland (and eventually the U.S.).
The West rose window of the Notre Dame cathedral (1220) has what appears to be Gemini wedding imagery, but the stained glass has been replaced at various times, so it’s difficult to know if the current image is the same pose as the original.
The pattern of NW France, Switzerland/Alsace, southern Germany (and the occasional example from northern Italy/southern Lombardy) seems to hold up quite well.
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JKP, that’s so cool. In your post you write “but is it possible that both the VMS and Das Buch der Natur were taken from a common source?” –> this is basically the same sentiment I came to through a completely different route: some of Lauber’s sources must have been very close to the VM or some of its sources.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it is proven now that Lauber’s studio itself was of relevance. I was even a bit confused to find out that its predecessor looks less like the VM, despite being closer in time (you also mentioned something along these lines in your post). But we now know better what to look for.
I still have not forgotten the many French parallels as well, so French MSS must certainly be included in an investigation.
What did you think about the shoelaces? 😉
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Great find, well done. I’ll follow this through (in my own style), it’s definitely one of the strongest attempts we have to trace the Voynich’s images back to their roots.
The only advice I’d give is to not worry about early or late dating, but to take things on their own terms and follow them through as you find them. That is, follow the historical logic through to the end, and leave the radiocarbon dating to catch up later. 🙂
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Koen, to answer your question, the boot laces ARE significant. Most illustrators didn’t bother adding boot laces (I’ve been keeping an eye out for them for quite a while). It’s especially difficult to find them in zodiac imagery, so it’s quite possible that the VMS illustrator may have gotten the idea outside of zodiac imagery.
Correction to my above post, I wrote NW France when I meant NE France.
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Hi Koen Gh,
well done, this is a really great find!
I look forward to seeing where this leads!
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Koen,
It’s lovely to see such solid effort rewarded by a general good will. Cheers.
If I may, I would say that you are right to avoid being too free and easy about chronology. By default we must suppose that an image in an early fifteenth-century manuscript could not have been influenced by one in a late fifteenth-century printed work. (We can get evidence of imagery leaping time and space etc. but proof is absolutely essential),
By default one must take it that a later printed work derives from the earlier, and manuscript, tradition and not vice versa.
Talk about the ‘Books of Nature’ has been going on for so many years, and constantly without attribution, that the allusion is near worthless: one must hunt up all the information anew because who knows who took it from whom during the past twenty years?
I certainly DO agree that after the middle of the fifteenth century there are found so many echoes of Vms-type imagery in Latin Christian works that it is only logical to suppose the content in the Vms was disseminated more widely through Latin Europe after c.1440, and especially to central Europe. I’m not suggesting the content of European cultural origins.. but that’s another matter.
Good to see all the enthusiasm!
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Diane,
I understand that the advance of the renaissance would produce more VM like imagery throughout. But I don’t think this chronology applies to the VM Gemini, Crossbowman and Virgo as it does to the other human figures in the MS. The Alsatian workshops’ mss are even said to rely on outdated 14thC (European) imagery. Indeed, several of the “workshop of 1418” manuscripts were originally erroneously dated to the 14th.
My point here is that the Gemini appear to be supplemented from a surprisingly standard, yet not astro-related source. Specifically from the stock of workshops who specialized in the quick copying of secular works.
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I agree with the independent specialists who saw nothing in the imagery characteristic of Christian Europe’s medieval or Renaissance culture. What we find in those later and mass produced works is surely a reflection of *part* of what we have here – but a detail is not a drawing, and so far we have found no drawing in any later European work which precisely echoes this series. I have often suggested that those interested in this series should consider Fanti’s work, but again only to show how later mass-produced books carry echoes of what is found earlier in the Vms. I am slowly (after a decade’s work) coming to the view that the language of the Vms is – as Georg Stolfi concluded – a central Asian language in use during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but more exactly I’m inclined to see the Vms’ script as another effort (akin to those others which I first brought to notice in Voynich studies) to render Asian script for Latins. It very early became clear to me that the Vms’ is a handbook of routes and goods. It is compiled from more than one older work, and I doubt that any European Christian was central to the process of its first compilation or even its first transmission to mainland Europe. I would remark yet again on the absence of those themes and forms by which we define, and immediately recognise cultural products of Christendom and of Islam.
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I was very surprised to see Vintler’s Flowers of Virtue there. I know the book from Kluge’s Rotwelsch source book (source #5, dated to 1411 there). Kluge notes that it’s apparently adapted from an Italian source and refers to Gödeke. I quickly checked the entry in Gödeke’s work about German poetry and it says that Vintler’s book is based on “Fiori di virtù” by Tomaseo Leoni around 1320. I assume that won’t help much, but at least we could now check if that one has a similar illustration with the passage.
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Thanks, that’s another lead to follow. I’m currently digging around in the Alsatian manuscripts and Willehalm. But at this point I think any work about courtly life and proper behavior may hold additional clues about the transmission of the image that ended up in the VM.
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I looked at a few manuscripts of Fiore di virtù (I mispelled it with an i in my earlier comment) and sadly couldn’t find much illustration at all. So it seems like a dead end, sadly.
However on an unrelated note, I went through the Lexicon Abbreciaturarum by Adriano Capelli, and noticed that one of the signature features of the Voynich font appears several times there, and almost exclusively in the 14th and 15th century with a sure preference for the 15th: https://i.imgur.com/3AxVrZU.png
I’m obviously not suggesting this as a reading, but instead suggest that if we knew where Capelli found these ligatures in particular, we could narrow down the provenance a bit more (as the authors might have used a few symbols they were used to). Frustratingly he gives no sources and instead has a long bibliography in the back of the book. I hope this wasn’t already widely known.
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Thank you for mentioning Leoni’s work, M.Jacob!
BTW, “Fiori di Virtù” is not a typo (just “flowers” vs “flower”); I also found “Fior di Virtù” as a third variant.
This paper (“Tierdarstellungen der Fiori di Virtù” by Otto Lehmann-Brockhaus) reproduces several Fiore di Virtù illustrations from different manuscripts.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27652000
BL Harley 3448 is an illustrated ms from Padua.
https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=7810&CollID=8&NStart=3448
The lady with the unicorn also appears in the Venice 1492 printed edition:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k134889n/f45.item
I couldn’t find anything terribly relevant though: I am not sure that Vintler’s illustrations derive from earlier versions of the work, but who knows?
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Something else we must definitely check is any precedents to the woodblock print http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/0002/bsb00024982/images/index.html?id=00024982&seite=28&fip=193.174.98.30&nativeno=%2F&groesser=100%25
In Capellanus or any derived/translated manuscripts. My current focus remains on Lauber and Willehalm, so if anyone is up for it… 🙂
The print remains the most accurate parallel for the pose, even though 1418 and Lauber add the proper clothing. Ideally we’d find out that working back, they intersect somewhere.
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The fiori/fiore issue explains why I had it listed as Blume der Tugend instead of Blumen der Tugend in my bibliography.
Unrelated to this, I want to share a little trick that I like to use when “reading” the circular digrams in the manuscript: You can crop them to roughly square size and then convert them from polar to cartesian coordinates. If you then stretch the resulting image to a proper width, they are fun to look at and easier to read. Here’s a crude example: https://i.imgur.com/D5Lir7n.jpg
It gets better the more carefully you crop them and the less distorted the page is in the first place.
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Turns out I shared the polar coordinate trick already on an earlier post. Seems like I’m a bit forgetful.
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Another comment after a slow re-reading of your post. I think you were right to emphasise the unusual crossing of the arms – which don’t appear in your later examples from Germany but which did appear in Vatican Reg lat 1324, A work tentatively attributed to France and dated fairly broadly to the fifteenth century. There’s a pdf paper about it online by Kristen Lippincott, which no doubt you’ve seen. I think this links better to the evidence of the month-name inscriptions which is among the substantial amount of evidence which places the last recension of the calendar to the northern French-English-northern Italian sphere during the later part of the fourteenth century and earlier part of the fifteenth. More exactly the months’ orthography has been linked to the style of a couple of foreign-influenced astronomical instruments from that time. I’ve often seen efforts made to connect the calendar-centres to images on still earlier planispheres and copies of the Aratus, many from the Carolingian or Ottonian period. Unfortunately I cannot say who is responsible for noticing that correspondence, since it is a custom among some Voynich writers to allow their readers to wrongly attribute to themselves the discoveries and observations made earlier by others. Still, in this case I think your noticing Vatican Reg lat 1324 -deserves more attention since the German printed books can be assumed to imitate earlier ones, and the Vms is earlier than they are, and its content earlier still in origin.
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To J. K. Petersen, you are right. The image represents the married couple. Did you notice that the Virgo and the Bride wore similar dress? The bride is Barbara of Celje and the groom is Emperor Sigismund. Please send me your e-mail at cvetkakocj@rogers.com and I will send you a picture to prove this.
I do not have the web page to post the picture.
Cvetka
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