Originally published at: Multispectral imaging of the Voynich Manuscript - Boing Boing
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My friend developed a laser scanning system that scans artifacts at various alternative wavelengths to find details you can’t see with the naked eye. He has brought out feathers and skin impressions on dinosaurs. He’s currently in South America scanning mummies with tattoos and other artifacts to glean any unseen details. Neat stuff.
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They need to find the correct wavelength.
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My daughter’s school has murals of famous paintings throughout the campus, including one big one of “The Blue Boy.” Last weekend we visited the Huntington Gallery where the painting is displayed and she was simultaneously happy and angered to learn that the painting originally had a very cute doggie, but the poor pooch got painted over and replaced with a pile of rocks because it was distracting viewers from the main subject.
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The amount of time and money spent on investigating the Voynich with almost nothing to show for it is utterly extraordinary.
It’s a fascinating document, but the overwhelming evidence is that the text and illustrations are entirely meaningless rather than being some uncracked medieval code. There are no real analogues for any of the pictures; the text doesn’t contain enough entropy to be a real language; and there’s no cryptographic methods from the time that resist modern analysis - but it sure looks convincing. A bit like the more recent Codex Seraphinianus.
The interesting story is who created it and why - I lean towards the theory that this was a prop for a court alchemist to impress the rich and powerful that its owner had access to secret information that would only reveal its secrets to the holder.
Long may the madness continue!
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This presupposes that alchemists were frauds rather than genuine researchers, which is not borne out by the rest of alchemical literature. Plus, I would expect at least some hermetical and allegorical imagery in an alchemical manuscript, even one that was made up. If only to establish credibility with any other alchemist who would see it.
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Why did the dog disappear? “I don’t know,” Bennett says. “It works compositionally. Probably it was just the concept.” Taking his cues from Sir Anthony Van Dyck’s early 17th-Century portraiture, Gainsborough, who painted “Blue Boy” in 1770, dressed his subject in a princely costume that would have been in style 130 years earlier. “I think the dog was so cute, so adorable–it’s a pooch–that it undercut the aristocratic conceits of the painting,” she says. “Or maybe Gainsborough thought all that fluff fought with the boy’s hat.”
It’s not as if the painting was revised after the fact.
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The theory I’ve seen wasn’t so much to impress other alchemists, instead it would be shown to credulous and wealthy princelings and nobilities in late medieval Europe.
A bit like the way the crypto community fleeced gullible investors with NFTs. The comparison breaks down there because the Voynich actually has some value.
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Well, like NFTs, it is worth what you can get someone to pay for it.
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Yeah, but would you not want to make it look like at least a bit like other alchemical manuscripts? So that those of your marks who have seen one before are more easily duped?
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I don’t know, maybe if this was supposed to sell the new hotness that’s so much better than the old stuff?
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