I personally believe that it's likely that the colors might have been added by someone else at a later time. However, if that is not the case, it’s possible the colors do not represent actual hues. Instead, they could serve as symbolic indicators-for instance, yellow petals or stems might signify that a plant is poisonous, blue might indicate the need for boiling, red could mean drying is required, and so on, following a system akin to herbalist or alchemist symbols. About the purple color - until the 19th century, purple dye was extremely rare and was primarily produced in the Byzantine Empire's specialized dye workshops. The decline of the Byzantine Empire began in the 14th century, and by the 1400s, most of its territory had fallen to the Ottomans, including regions known for producing the Tynian Purple. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the production of this color significantly stopped. It might just be an another clue suggesting that the VMS was really created in the early 1400s. Isn't it possible to carbon date the colors? The dyes could have some organic component - for example Tynian purple is made from aquatic snail's mucus.
As I've explained (not at ninja), there is a convention evident by which colours in the pink-to-purple-and black are rendered by blue, or by red, with red for the lighter end of the spectrum and blue for the darker. It is quite consistent. Red and Blue are also used literally in some cases. One could argue that it's only due to the fifteenth-century painters' limited palette, but it is consistent and , as I concluded, deliberate. There is an especially interesting avoidance of purple-black, which can extend in some cases to elimination of that element - as for example the banana group (f.13) - where the spathe is (so to speak) sliced away. It's one of the few of these avoidances which can also be seen in some Latin herbals. I think your 'blue-and-white' observation is most interesting - and more interesting than perhaps you realise. :) Alsato telling is that in your study of Latin herbals, you found that they tended to use red, not blue, to represent purple. That's a very interesting difference between the Voynich and those herbals of the Latin type. Most illuminating. (pardon the pun).
Diane, when it comes to flower petals (which I checked initially), purple nor black can explain what we are seeing in the VM. There aren't all that many black petals. And in one of my slides I accounted for purple by adding this to blue. The proportions are still way off. (Also, it is apparently not uncommon for herbal manuscripts to lack purple). In the VM, it looks like blue cannibalizes *all* other colors, especially yellow/orange, but also everything else. Apart from white, which is also overrepresented in the petals.
@@koengheuens Yes, I took those comments in your video. It would be fun to have a real conversation about this - including reasonable first assumptions and so on, but in comments like this it can seem just heckling. I have to say that the default explanation for most historians of art would probably be that the fifteenth-century copy was limited by what the painter was provided in terms of available pigments, so by that criterion it hardly matters what is done in any other manuscript, herbal or otherwise. I wouldn't agree, but I've been working through he drawings for almost 15 years, so I can explain - including to specialists - just why I cannot adopt that seemingly obvious and sensible position.
Makes me think of those old Jommeke or Nero comics you often see on Flemish flea markets, they were printed in black, white, red and blue. It was th cheapest option for the printers bakc then.
somehow youtube suggested this video to me, and I'm afraid to jump down that rabbit hole :D perhaps these points have already been made, because I hate to admit that I wasn't listening too closely: - recently I learned that colours, our perception of them and later attempts of their accurate representation are prone to the culture we live in, an example are two blues in Russian (sinyi and goluboy), similarly afaik the ancient Greeks had somehow shifted meaning of colours, in the Iliad e. g. sky is bronze, sheep were in the colour of wine, etc. as if they were using a limited set of colours and that led them to this result - to give you a corresponding example: modern people often do this with sounds, in my native Polish there are sounds represented by e.g. "dż". "dź" "ż" "ź" that to an untrained ear might sound the same, and even if you can hear the difference, realising it is another story altogether - the author of the paintings simply saw the word differently than we do: they were colour-blind in some way, and the colours used represented the same thing to them, or just the opposite: they saw more colours than we can, and again, the colours used are the closest possible representation, heck, maybe the representation is/was correct because the paints emitted the same wavelengths to the author (but may not emit them anymore due to aging)
It could be an explanation, though certainly by the Middle Ages, blue and green were very much distinct colors. Blue especially had strong symbolic connotations (like the Virgin Mary), and was highly valued in painting and manuscript illumination. So my feeling is that blue pigment would have been very much a distinct thing to anyone even remotely associated with manuscript production.
He could be using real cyanobacteria it's liquid, it's creamy, it dries down to powder, stains blue green to aged pinks& purples when dying. Its most abundant paint could be filtered naturally.
The types of cyanobacteria that are used for blue pigment are free living and aquatic, not something you'd be able to cultivate in the medieval period. Terrestrial cyanobacterial colonies like Nostoc which medieval writers knew and wrote about dries to a ruddy brown or green-black, and no pigment uses are documented for it from the time period. Blue was a difficult color in pre-industrial times no matter how you sliced it. It was sourced either from ground minerals (lapis lazuli, azurite) or very labor and material intensive plant processes (indigo from woad and turnsole). Azurite-based pigment was your cost effective option but it still cost something like ten day's wages for a pound in the 1500s. In other words, not something you want to be slathering on something in abundance unless you really cared about it...
@@onethreeify that would still be excessive amounts of yellow stalks compared to other herbals. So they overdid it on the stalks and then all else was ruined? Sounds like messy planning overall :) Note that the pigments used in the VM have been determined to be simple ones in ample supply. Those who could get their hands on ink and parchment would probably not have lacked these pigments either.
@@koengheuens that's interesting, i didn't know that! its so sad that we don't know if the colors are original or not since it could help a lot! the voynich manuscript is so interesting! thank you for all of your videos i have already watched many of them
@@koengheuens i had a thought at work today. was there any difference in color between herbal a and herbal b? because if there is a difference, that would strongly indicate that it was the artists (who are the painters which i think you argue very well in the E discussion videos with Lisa) who also did the coloring, since no one after the writing has known that there was a difference between herbal a and herbal b and a later painter would apply all paint equally. i haven't had time to rewatch the video so maybe you mention it but i cant remember if you did or not haha
@@koengheuens i just did a quick comparison myself and found that red is overrepresented in herbal a and white is overrepresented in herbal b. its very crude research but the difference is quite stark: herbal a uses red on around half of all flowers, herbal b only uses it on around 12%, and herbal a uses white around 65% of the time and herbal b basically 99%. edit: i wouldn't trust myself but maybe someone who is good at painting/color could take an extra look?
@@eliskwire some researchers insist that they are added later. Most at least keep the option open. Often there's the idea that certain colors are original and others aren't... It's all quite complex. I keep both options open. Regarding your first question, again this is tricky. A minority of the plants are very clearly based on existing ones. For example there's a convincing viola (pansy). With most plants though, you'll have a flash of recognition at best but then notice the leaves are the wrong shape. Or you might see perfectly executed leaves for one plant, but then they put a different kind of flower on it. That's what the Voynich is often about: recognizable at first sight but not at second sight :) I guess the color scheme of the plants does match that tendency.
Colors really do seem to be added later. The VM is not a sloppy piece of work by any means. Yet the part that also comes last is done very sloppily, implying it wasn’t just done last but later.
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I personally believe that it's likely that the colors might have been added by someone else at a later time. However, if that is not the case, it’s possible the colors do not represent actual hues. Instead, they could serve as symbolic indicators-for instance, yellow petals or stems might signify that a plant is poisonous, blue might indicate the need for boiling, red could mean drying is required, and so on, following a system akin to herbalist or alchemist symbols.
About the purple color - until the 19th century, purple dye was extremely rare and was primarily produced in the Byzantine Empire's specialized dye workshops. The decline of the Byzantine Empire began in the 14th century, and by the 1400s, most of its territory had fallen to the Ottomans, including regions known for producing the Tynian Purple. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the production of this color significantly stopped. It might just be an another clue suggesting that the VMS was really created in the early 1400s.
Isn't it possible to carbon date the colors? The dyes could have some organic component - for example Tynian purple is made from aquatic snail's mucus.
As I've explained (not at ninja), there is a convention evident by which colours in the pink-to-purple-and black are rendered by blue, or by red, with red for the lighter end of the spectrum and blue for the darker. It is quite consistent. Red and Blue are also used literally in some cases. One could argue that it's only due to the fifteenth-century painters' limited palette, but it is consistent and , as I concluded, deliberate. There is an especially interesting avoidance of purple-black, which can extend in some cases to elimination of that element - as for example the banana group (f.13) - where the spathe is (so to speak) sliced away. It's one of the few of these avoidances which can also be seen in some Latin herbals. I think your 'blue-and-white' observation is most interesting - and more interesting than perhaps you realise. :) Alsato telling is that in your study of Latin herbals, you found that they tended to use red, not blue, to represent purple. That's a very interesting difference between the Voynich and those herbals of the Latin type. Most illuminating. (pardon the pun).
Diane, when it comes to flower petals (which I checked initially), purple nor black can explain what we are seeing in the VM. There aren't all that many black petals. And in one of my slides I accounted for purple by adding this to blue. The proportions are still way off. (Also, it is apparently not uncommon for herbal manuscripts to lack purple).
In the VM, it looks like blue cannibalizes *all* other colors, especially yellow/orange, but also everything else. Apart from white, which is also overrepresented in the petals.
@@koengheuens Yes, I took those comments in your video. It would be fun to have a real conversation about this - including reasonable first assumptions and so on, but in comments like this it can seem just heckling. I have to say that the default explanation for most historians of art would probably be that the fifteenth-century copy was limited by what the painter was provided in terms of available pigments, so by that criterion it hardly matters what is done in any other manuscript, herbal or otherwise. I wouldn't agree, but I've been working through he drawings for almost 15 years, so I can explain - including to specialists - just why I cannot adopt that seemingly obvious and sensible position.
Makes me think of those old Jommeke or Nero comics you often see on Flemish flea markets, they were printed in black, white, red and blue. It was th cheapest option for the printers bakc then.
somehow youtube suggested this video to me, and I'm afraid to jump down that rabbit hole :D
perhaps these points have already been made, because I hate to admit that I wasn't listening too closely:
- recently I learned that colours, our perception of them and later attempts of their accurate representation are prone to the culture we live in, an example are two blues in Russian (sinyi and goluboy), similarly afaik the ancient Greeks had somehow shifted meaning of colours, in the Iliad e. g. sky is bronze, sheep were in the colour of wine, etc. as if they were using a limited set of colours and that led them to this result - to give you a corresponding example: modern people often do this with sounds, in my native Polish there are sounds represented by e.g. "dż". "dź" "ż" "ź" that to an untrained ear might sound the same, and even if you can hear the difference, realising it is another story altogether
- the author of the paintings simply saw the word differently than we do: they were colour-blind in some way, and the colours used represented the same thing to them, or just the opposite: they saw more colours than we can, and again, the colours used are the closest possible representation, heck, maybe the representation is/was correct because the paints emitted the same wavelengths to the author (but may not emit them anymore due to aging)
It could be an explanation, though certainly by the Middle Ages, blue and green were very much distinct colors. Blue especially had strong symbolic connotations (like the Virgin Mary), and was highly valued in painting and manuscript illumination. So my feeling is that blue pigment would have been very much a distinct thing to anyone even remotely associated with manuscript production.
He could be using real cyanobacteria it's liquid, it's creamy, it dries down to powder, stains blue green to aged pinks& purples when dying. Its most abundant paint could be filtered naturally.
The types of cyanobacteria that are used for blue pigment are free living and aquatic, not something you'd be able to cultivate in the medieval period. Terrestrial cyanobacterial colonies like Nostoc which medieval writers knew and wrote about dries to a ruddy brown or green-black, and no pigment uses are documented for it from the time period.
Blue was a difficult color in pre-industrial times no matter how you sliced it. It was sourced either from ground minerals (lapis lazuli, azurite) or very labor and material intensive plant processes (indigo from woad and turnsole). Azurite-based pigment was your cost effective option but it still cost something like ten day's wages for a pound in the 1500s. In other words, not something you want to be slathering on something in abundance unless you really cared about it...
maybe they used up all the yellow filling in the stalks and didnt have any left over to fill in the petals?
@@onethreeify that would still be excessive amounts of yellow stalks compared to other herbals. So they overdid it on the stalks and then all else was ruined? Sounds like messy planning overall :)
Note that the pigments used in the VM have been determined to be simple ones in ample supply. Those who could get their hands on ink and parchment would probably not have lacked these pigments either.
@@koengheuens that's interesting, i didn't know that! its so sad that we don't know if the colors are original or not since it could help a lot! the voynich manuscript is so interesting! thank you for all of your videos i have already watched many of them
@@onethreeify thank you! My next video has a bit of a delay but it's scripted and recorded, I just need to animate it now.
@@koengheuens i had a thought at work today. was there any difference in color between herbal a and herbal b? because if there is a difference, that would strongly indicate that it was the artists (who are the painters which i think you argue very well in the E discussion videos with Lisa) who also did the coloring, since no one after the writing has known that there was a difference between herbal a and herbal b and a later painter would apply all paint equally.
i haven't had time to rewatch the video so maybe you mention it but i cant remember if you did or not haha
@@koengheuens i just did a quick comparison myself and found that red is overrepresented in herbal a and white is overrepresented in herbal b. its very crude research but the difference is quite stark: herbal a uses red on around half of all flowers, herbal b only uses it on around 12%, and herbal a uses white around 65% of the time and herbal b basically 99%.
edit: i wouldn't trust myself but maybe someone who is good at painting/color could take an extra look?
My hypothesis is that the plant drawings are a diversion and have nothing to do with the text. Besides, those plants don't exist, do they?
Also, if the colors are consistent with some medieval art, as you demonstrated, I see no reason to believe they were added later.
@@eliskwire some researchers insist that they are added later. Most at least keep the option open. Often there's the idea that certain colors are original and others aren't... It's all quite complex. I keep both options open.
Regarding your first question, again this is tricky. A minority of the plants are very clearly based on existing ones. For example there's a convincing viola (pansy). With most plants though, you'll have a flash of recognition at best but then notice the leaves are the wrong shape. Or you might see perfectly executed leaves for one plant, but then they put a different kind of flower on it. That's what the Voynich is often about: recognizable at first sight but not at second sight :) I guess the color scheme of the plants does match that tendency.
Colors really do seem to be added later. The VM is not a sloppy piece of work by any means. Yet the part that also comes last is done very sloppily, implying it wasn’t just done last but later.