Hidden Van Gogh painting...

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Here's a nice little article showing how science and art history research can work together in a harmonious way: using high-intensity x-rays, a materials scientist and a chemist found an portrait hidden beneath Van Gogh's "Patch of Grass".

Incidentally, the webpage is #1 of a set of 7, most of which are a bit poor: but photo #6, Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Cecilia Gallerani with her ermine (though I think it's actually a weasel) as captured by Pascal Cotte's multispectral trickery, is quite cool. :-)

Become A Voynich Manuscript Expert In Just 5 Minutes...

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Would having "Expert on the Voynich Manuscript" on your CV significantly raise your perceived intellectuality (i.e. an extra ten grand per year on your salary)? It would? Then read on, and I'll reveal the secret two-stage process that They don't want you to find out...

Stage One. You start out by pretending to be a Voynich expert. All you have to know is:

(a) That the two jargon terms for the Voynich Manuscript are "VMs" (because "Ms" or "MS" is short for "manuscript") and "Beinecke MS 408" (because it's 408th in the Beinecke Library's collection of manuscripts);
(b) That the VMs lives at Yale University in New Haven (because that's what the Beinecke Library is part of); and
(c) That the VMs is a mysterious old handwritten book that nobody can read. Not even me!

If you really want, you can also read the Wikipedia VMs page: but apart from the fact that the Voynich Manuscript was [re]discovered in Italy in 1912 by dodgy book dealer Wilfrid Voynich (hence its name), feel free to basically skip the rest.

Incidentally, if you're ever asked about anyone who has written about the VMs (Newbold, Brumbaugh, Terence McKenna, anyone really), any real Voynich expert would nod sympathetically and say "Poor old X - if only they had known what we know now". Of course, this is a big fat lie, because we still know basically sod all about the VMs.

Stage Two. You continue by actually becoming a Voynich expert. This is also easy, as long as you can get a working grasp of the following basic statements:-

• The VMs was probably made by a right-handed European between 1250 and 1640.
  If post-1622, explain how Jacob de Tepenec's signature got on the front
  If post-1500, explain how 15th century quire numbers got on it
  If pre-1450, explain how Leonardo-style hatching ended up in some of the drawings
  
• If the VMs is a language, note that its words don't function like those in real languages
  If the VMs is a cipher, note that it doesn't work like any known cipher
  If the VMs is nonsense, note that its letters appears to follow unknown rules
  If the VMs' plants are botanical, note that most don't resemble real plants

Now all you have to do is to devise your very own really, really lame signature theory. As long as it amuses you and doesn't trample on the above dull bullet-points too badly, congratulations - you're right up there with the big hitters! But how should you construct this new theory?

Actually, it's quite helpful here to project how you feel about your own work onto how you think the original author(s) felt about the VMs. For example, if you think that your own work is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written solely to convince your employers to pay your wages, then you might try devising your own variant of the basic hoax theory template (which argues that the VMs is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written by [insert name here] solely to convince Emperor Rudolph II to pay a rumoured 600 gold ducats).

But be bold in your theorising! Be creative! Perhaps think of some vaguely Renaissance figure you admire (though Leonardo's already taken, and he was left-handed anyway, d'oh!) or just happen to remember, preferably someone whose name you can consistently spell correctly. Wafer-thin historical connections to herbal medicine, astrology, astronomy, ciphers and mystery are probably bonuses here. So, Nostradamus would be a good 'un: Queen Elizabeth I not so good.

But remember, you're not trying to prove your theory is correct here (for what kind of an idiot would attempt that with such scanty evidence, 500-ish years after the event?) Rather, you're just staking your claim to the possibility that [random person X] might have been the author. And the level of proof required to achieve that is, frankly, negligible.

And hey, even if you choose the name with a pin and a biographical dictionary, if it eventually turns out that you are right, think how unbearably smug you'll be. Possibly for decades!

Finally: however bad projecting your own life onto the VMs' blank canvas may be as an historical approach (and believe me, it lies somewhere between 'rubbish' and 'pants'), it is guaranteed to give you plenty of interestingly ironical things to say about the VMs when you're asked about it at those hip higher-earner parties you'll be attending. Oh, and at your book-launch too, naturally. :-)

Czech Voynich theory...

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My fellow Voynich old-timer Jan Hurych has long been interested in various Prague-linked research strands: after all, Prague was home to the first three properly-documented owners of the Voynich Manuscript (Sinapius, Georg Baresch, and Johannes Marcus Marci), as well as its most illustrious claimed owner (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II).

It is certainly true that Rudolph's interests and obsessions acted as a powerful magnet to draw wonders from all over Europe to his court. Yet given that the claimed link with John Dee and Edward Kelley is gossamer-thin, it is no less sensible to wonder whether the VMs had been brought to Prague by someone from the town: perhaps someone well-travelled?

I mentioned Rudolph II's manuscript-collecting astronomer / astrologer / herbalist / physician Tadeás Hájek here recently (who studied in Italy), but Jan Hurych regales me with tales of several others: for one, Hájek's father (Simon Baccalareus) studied alchemy and collected manuscripts... though what happened to his library after his death is not currently known.

Jan has put together a nice page on one of his favourite Renaissance Czech travelling knights, Krystof Harant de Polzic and Bezdruzic, and his travels from Venice to Crete to Cyprus to the Holy Land to Egypt (etc). But I have to say that if a writer had picked up an intriguing cipher manuscript on their travels, it would be one of the first things they would write about: yet there is no mention. So we can probably rule Harant out, sorry Jan. :-(

But Jan brings up a rather more full-on Czech Voynich theory, courtesy of Karel Dudek's Czech webpage (though I used Google Translate, Dudek also put up his own English translation here). Dudek discusses Georg Handsch of Limuz (1529-1578), whose 1563 German translation of Matthioli's Latin herbal came out a year after Tadeás Hájek's Czech translation (it even used the same nice woodcuts!) Like Hájek, Handsch was a physician living in Prague, but whose main client was instead Ferdinand II Tyrolský (1529-1595) and his wealthy wife Filipina Welserová (1527-1580).

Dudek got his information from Leopold Selfender's "Handsch Georg von Limuz - Lebensbild a Arztes aus dem XVI.Jahrenhunderts": but after a bit of a false start (linking Handsch directly to Baresch, which I doubt would convince anyone), he proposes a possible chain of ownership from Handsch -> Welserová -> Ferdinand II Tyrolský -> Rudolph II -> Horcicky (Sinapius), before Horcicky's estate got looted in the chaos of 1618 and the manuscript somehow ended up with Baresch (with the signature erased).

OK... but why Handsch? Dudek points to the VMs' botany, and Handsch's translation of Matthioli's herbal (though I'd have to say that Hájek fits that bill even better). Dudek also discusses a book by Handsch based on his trips to visit medicinal baths and spas in 1571 called "Die Elbfischerei in Bohmen und Meissen" (eventually published in Prague in 1933), and sees parallels with the VMs' water section there.

But Dudek gets even more speculative, talking about whether Bartoloměj Welser was financed by Charles V to undertake a (possibly Lutheran?) mission to South America, and drew pictures inspired by exotic plants he saw beside the Orinoco (hey, I thought he was a Womble?)

It's a good story, but a little lacking in connection to the VMs: and doesn't really explain why we see (for example) 15th century handwriting in the quire numbers, or even the Occitan-like month names on the zodiac, etc. Perhaps we should really admit that looking for an origin for the VMs in Prague may be a little too hopeful, not dissimilar to the way 19th century German historians' looked to see if Nicholas of Cusa might secretly have been some kind of Teutonic Leonardo. Nice try... but no cigar.

Leonardo gets a face...?

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It's not the greatest of art history mysteries, but if you haven't seen this 4-minute YouTube clip from www.ted.com (an interesting boundary-crossing conference phenomenon you may not have come across) about how Siegfried Woldhek went looking for Leonardo's face in his notebooks, I think you've missed out.

Most modern stories about Leonardo I'd advise taking with a pinch of salt (occasionally more), but this one's perhaps just a touch more substantial. A simple idea, but one nicely followed through!

[Big restecp goes out to my artist sister Liz Jose for passing this link my way.]

Thorndike on the Voynich Manuscript!

I've often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich's cipher manuscript mania/hype was at its peak. As a well-known writer on alchemy, magic and science, my guess is that Thorndike would surely have been one of those distinguished American academics and historians whom Voynich tried so hard to court after his move from Europe to New York.

One of my ongoing projects is to work my way through all of Thorndike's works, as it seems to me that his science/magic research programme carved a trail through the jungle of mostly-unread proto-scientific manuscripts that probably falls close to where the Voynich Manuscript is situated: and few historians since him have felt any pressing need to build on his work except in generally quite specific ways. All of which is why I happened to be reading Chapter VII "Nicholas of Cusa and the Triple Motion of the Earth" in Thorndike's "Science & Thought in the Fifteenth Century" (1929).

Firstly, you need to understand that Thorndike thought that the whole Burckhardtian notion of the (supposedly fabulous and extraordinary) Renaissance was plain ridiculous: there were countless examples of ingenuity, invention, and insight throughout the Middle Ages (and, indeed, throughout all history) to be found, if you just bothered to take the time and effort to place events and writings within their own context.

Furthermore, Thorndike believed that lazy historians, having set up this false opposition between (high) Renaissance culture and (low) medieval scholasticism, then went looking for exceptional individuals who somehow bucked that trend, "forerunners, predictors, or martyrs of the glorious age of modern science that was to come." (p.133) The list of usual suspects Thorndike suggests - "Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Peurbach and Regiomontanus, Leonardo da Vinci" - appears to me not far from how the fake table of Priory of Sion Grand Masters would have looked, if Pierre Plantard been a tad more receptive to non-French history.

Of course, Thorndike - being Thorndike - then goes on to demonstrate precisely how the whole myth around Nicholas of Cusa arose: basically, German historians looking out for a German 'forerunner, predictor, or martyr' plucked three marginal fragments from Nicholas's work and wove them together to tell a story that was, frankly, not there to be told. Then you can almost feel the fever rising in Thorndike's genuinely angry brow when he continues:

"Could anything, even the most childish of medieval superstitions, be more unscientific, unhistorical, and lacking in common sense than this absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation, by modern investigators and historians of science?" (p.137)

Punchy (and grouchy) stuff: but he's far from finished yet. He has an example of something even more scandalous which he feels compelled to share with us:-

"When are we ever going to come out of it? To stop approaching the study of medieval science by such occult methods as the scrutiny of a manuscript supposed to have been written by Roger Bacon in cipher, instead of by reading the numerous scientific manuscripts that are expressed in straightforward and coherent, albeit somewhat abbreviated, Latin?" (p.137)

So there you have it. In 1929, while Wilfrid Voynich was still alive, Thorndike took a measured look at Voynich's and Newbold's "Roger Bacon Manuscript" nonsense, and placed it straight in the category of "absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation".

John Manly may have been more dismissive of Newboldian cryptography in his article in Speculum 6 (July 1931), but Thorndike was no less dismissive of Newboldian history in print in 1929. Just so you know!

The cult of Leonardo?

(...da Vinci, not di Caprio, in case you think I've lost my mind).

Sure, Leonardo was a lovely guy, great technique, cutting edge, a bit flaky - but he was a Quattrocento Florentine, and (if you read Jacob Burckhardt only a little bit too literally) they were pretty much all like that back then. So what is the modern-day 'cult of personality' surrounding Leonardo really about?

An old friend's Italian partner once told me that people in Italy generally rated Brunelleschi over Leonardo: and I can quite see (Brunelleschi's famous sinking barge aside) why that might well be true. For me, there are two raw types of genius: visionary (who can see how things ought to work with a clarity the rest of us don't have access to) and practical (who make the impossible actually happen). Sure, Leonardo was a visionary genius, who managed to 'ship a few products': but Brunelleschi's genius comes across as both visionary and practical.

And so it seems to me that sometime over the last century, we (as a society) began to value the visionary over the practical (and the inspiration over the perspiration), as if we can somehow subsist on ideas without action. The cult of Leonardo merely rides this cultural wave, not unlike a carved figurehead on the prow of the ship we're sailing in: he was simply a good match for the impractical historical non-hero archetype we happened to be looking for.

Which is not to say that I don't value all the wonderful books on Leonardo out there: my two current favourites are the epic 3d model-fest "Leonardo's Machines" by Mario Taddei and Edoardo Zanon (Giunti, 2005), and Martin Kemp's splendid "Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design" (V&A Publications, 2006). But rather, I see Leonardo as being the poster-child for modern anti-practical sentiments, chosen centuries after his death: and the modern worshipping of his life and work as being part of an ideological programme I don't really understand. The culture preceded the cult, if you like.

I can't also help wondering if the study of Leonardo is somehow holding back our notion of early modern history, as if we cannot but help look at the Quattrocento through the knotted cluster of ideas about invention we project so strongly onto da Vinci. Perhaps we can do better...

Anyway, today's gratuitous Leonardo link comes courtesy of The Guardian: a story about film director Peter Greenaway quite literally projecting his own story onto the Last Supper. Having said that, Leonardo would probably have approved: his career in Milan revolved not around painting or engineering, but around designing dramatic entertainments for the Sforza court and its visitors - he was essentially a film director without film.

Incidentally, I recall a Philip K. Dick short story where a whole sequence of "Mona Lisa"s are discovered, along with a huge wooden machine in a cave for "playing" them, like a gigantic zoetrope: which then reveals the (surprisingly saucy) secret behind her smile... But perhaps I just dreamt it. :-)

Mona Lisa overkill...

Why is it that so many people wonder whether Leonardo da Vinci created the Voynich Manuscript? Even well-informed, thoughtful people like Edith Sherwood (whose Adwords ad frequently pops up if you happen to Google for "Voynich") manage to succumb to this notion.

There's only one little problem: the VMs' pen-strokes predominantly go from top-left to bottom-right, clearly indicating that it was written by someone who was right-handed. (Or left-handed, writing from right-to-left with the pages upside-down: but that just seems a bit stupid). In terms of identifying the author, that's about 10% of the population eliminated: but, sadly, this is the tranche containing our Florentine chum Leonardo.

It's probably symptomatic of what I call "join-the-dots history", where you start with a set of evocative pieces and then work out the minimum amount of evidence you need to appropriate / use / abuse to link them together in a way that suggests some kind of correlation. For example, if you started with the (fake) Priory of Sion, Leonardo da Vinci, and Opus Dei... errrrrm... no, that would never work...

Anyway, here's the latest real news on Leonardo: apparently, the Mona Lisa was indeed a picture of Lisa del Giocondo, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and was being painted in October 1503. We have a "Heidelberg library expert" called Armin Schlechter to thank for finding this: and thankful I am.