Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408): images, diagrams and symbology — survey and analysis plan

Scope: iconographic comparanda, the 2014/2024 multispectral results, computational methods for diagram and glyph analysis, machine-readable comparanda, and a ranked plan of analyses runnable on the Yale IIIF images (213 canvases, 2000 px JPEGs already on disk) with OpenCV/scikit-image.

Verification key. VERIFIED = the page was fetched, or the URL/DOI appeared in a search result, during this survey. VERIFIED (second-hand) = the item is reported on a fetched page (usually voynich.nu or a blog) but the underlying work was not itself fetched. UNVERIFIED = not seen in any fetched page or search result; included only where the brief asked for the item, and flagged. No manuscript shelfmark or URL below is given from memory alone; where the collected material has no digitisation URL, none is given.

Coverage note. The research run that collected this material stopped early. Items the brief lists that the material does not touch are named as gaps in section 6 rather than filled from memory.

1. Iconographic comparanda

1.1 Zodiac cycles

What is established. The zodiac section (Q10–Q12, f70v2–f73v) consists of concentric rings of mostly female figures ("nymphs") holding stars around a central sign emblem; usually 30 figures per sign, with Aries and Taurus each split over two pages of 15; the cycle starts with Pisces; Capricorn and Aquarius are missing with the lost f74. Zandbergen, Voynich MS: Illustration comparisons, https://voynich.nu/illustr.html — VERIFIED (fetched). The same page reports that a comparison of "well over 100" zodiac cycles found the closest similarity with several South German manuscripts; Sagittarius-as-crossbowman precedents are German, c. 1400–1500; Scorpio has no close match.

Sagittarius crossbow. Zandbergen's Q12 page (https://mail.voynich.nu/q12/index.html — VERIFIED, fetched) calls the crossbow Sagittarius on f73v "perhaps the clearest connection of the Voynich MS with German manuscript tradition." Ewa Śnieżyńska-Stolot (Jagiellonian University), whose comments reached Zandbergen through Rafał Prinke in 2001, noted that the bow was updated to a crossbow in the 15th century, consistent with the other modernised figures; she dated the clothing to the 14th/15th c. and men's headdresses to the 15th c., estimated mid-15th c., and read the whole as a liberal-arts student's notebook. She compared Beinecke MS 225 (owned by Paul de Worczin, Kraków student 1422). All VERIFIED (second-hand, voynich.nu/illustr.html). Dieter Blume (2012, 2016) is reported there as confirming her main points, pointing to Alfonso el Sabio manuscripts, and calling the Voynich cycle idiosyncratic — citation details UNVERIFIED (not given on the page). Ponzi & Worley, "f73v Zodiac and Sagittarius page", https://stephenbax.net/?p=1656 (VERIFIED URL; not fetched) is reported to cite Cod. Sang. 827 and Munich CGM 7269 as crossbow parallels (VERIFIED second-hand).

Marco Ponzi's feature-matrix comparison. "The VM Zodiac as a pictorial cycle: a comparative analysis", https://stephenbax.net/?p=1755 — VERIFIED (fetched). 131 cycles scored on 20 boolean features (partly after Johannes Klein, partly after the Warburg Institute database), sources from 26 modern nations, mostly 13th–15th c. Best matches: ÖNB cod. 1842 (Poland, ~80%, few images available), Heidelberg Cod. Pal. germ. 298 (Bavaria, 70%), Graz MS 286 (Seckau, 65%), Soissons stained glass (60%), Strasbourg Cathedral reliefs (60%); also Cod. Sang. 402, Morgan M.700, BAV Pal. lat. 1369, BnF lat. 7351, Berlin Ms. germ. fol. 1191. Other shelfmarks in his table: Morgan M.511, Morgan G.1, BnF lat. 7352, BnF lat. 7028, Dresden A.46.a, Cod. Pal. germ. 148, Cod. Bodmer 30, Mantova lat. 209, Bodleian Opp. 161, BL Harley 7182, Walters W.37. Findings: crossbow Sagittarius only in German-speaking areas; fully human Sagittarius absent from southern cycles; Gemini as a dressed, embracing, mixed-sex couple only in ÖNB 1842; lizard-like Scorpio common outside the Mediterranean; Pisces knot-and-cord matches nothing exactly; duplicated Cancer very rare; stars with curved tails in no examined source. Conclusion: Central European or French model, c. 1160–1450; Italian/Spanish unlikely; Arabic/Persian almost impossible. This is a proposed localisation, methodologically the strongest in the field because it is a scored matrix rather than a single match.

Gemini and the Diebold Lauber workshop (Koen Gheuens). Reported in Pelling, "Voynich zodiac Gemini and the workshop of Diebold Lauber", https://ciphermysteries.com/2018/09/10/voynich-zodiac-gemini-and-the-workshop-of-diebold-lauber — VERIFIED (fetched). Gheuens (2016) traced the crossed-hands "double handshake" of the Voynich Gemini to a marriage pose, and followed it to Lauber's Hagenau (Alsace) workshop, c. 80 manuscripts dated 1427–1467; a 1448 Lauber marriage drawing is the closest parallel (no shelfmark given in the post). Pelling adds Cod. Pal. germ. 314 fol. 4ar (Lauber's advertisement, 1443–49), the McKell calendar (Schilling 1958, c. 1430–50, sold 2015), and Vatican Pal. lat. 1370 (mid-15th c., possibly Strasbourg; his own suggestion, not Gheuens's). Gheuens's own blog post was not located in the material; the voynich.nu page cites his blog as herculeaf.wordpress.com (VERIFIED second-hand for a 2024 post, see 1.4). Status: proposed; visually persuasive to Pelling; untested statistically.

Concrete analysis. Ponzi's matrix is the right object to rebuild and publish as data: 131 rows × 20 columns plus region, date, medium. From it one can (a) compute a proper distance (Jaccard/Hamming on the 20 features) rather than a percentage match, (b) cluster the cycles and locate the Voynich cycle in the dendrogram, and (c) bootstrap: how often does a randomly chosen German cycle land as close as the Voynich one does to its nearest neighbour? Data needed: Ponzi's per-cycle scores (tables in the post), and the Voynich row re-scored independently from the Yale images for f70v2–f73v. Null: feature-permutation (shuffle each column independently across cycles) to see whether the Voynich cycle's nearest-neighbour distance is lower than chance. This is text/table work, not image processing; ~12 h if Ponzi's tables are machine-readable, more if they must be transcribed from the post.

1.2 Paranatellonta and degree images

Zandbergen (voynich.nu/illustr.html — VERIFIED) reports Śnieżyńska-Stolot's suggestion that the 30 figures per sign relate to the paranatellonta tradition (one image per degree), with related images in Vatican BAV Reg. lat. 1283 (Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo at digi.vatlib.it view pages MSS_Reg.lat.1283.pt.A/0012, /0014, /0016, /0018). The IIIF manifest https://digi.vatlib.it/iiif/MSS_Reg.lat.1283.pt.A/manifest.json returned HTTP 200 in this survey — VERIFIED. The Astrolabium planum (Johannes Engel, 1488) and Picatrix images are not in the collected material — UNVERIFIED, gap. A Zenodo item that surfaced in the Śnieżyńska-Stolot search (Kauler & "OpenAI, ChatGPT", "Voynich Manuscript Research, Chapter 3: Astrology and Medical Calendars", DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17024045, 2025 — VERIFIED URL/DOI) is an AI-written interpretive essay and does not address paranatellonta; it should not be cited as scholarship.

Concrete analysis. The paranatellonta hypothesis predicts that the 30 nymphs of a sign are individuated (each degree has its own image), while a decorative hypothesis predicts uniformity with random variation. Code each nymph's attributes (section 3.6) and test whether attribute entropy per ring is higher than for a null of 30 draws from the pooled attribute distribution; also test whether attributes track position in the ring (degree order) rather than being i.i.d. Reg. lat. 1283 degree images provide a positive control: code them with the same schema and check that their per-degree entropy is high.

1.3 Balneological section (Q13)

Zandbergen (VERIFIED) credits Brian Smith (late 1990s) and Adam McLean with the De balneis Puteolanis comparison; the Vatican copy Ross. 379 is illustrated with view links f30r /0063, f36r /0075, f40r /0083, f46r /0095; water is painted green in both. Some Balneis copies show bellows and an enema bag, which may explain objects held by Voynich figures. The IIIF manifest https://digi.vatlib.it/iiif/MSS_Ross.379/manifest.json returned 200 — VERIFIED. Pelling and Claston propose Q13 is two mixed sub-sections (Q13A/Q13B); f78v and f81r form one design with water flowing left to right, now separated by an intervening bifolium — VERIFIED (second-hand, voynich.nu). Davis's 2025 talk (section 2) addresses Q13 order with "singulions" (single-bifolium quires) and LSA text similarity. Biblioteca Angelica MS 1474 appears only as search hits (bibliotecaangelica.cultura.gov.it; finestresullarte.info article) — no digitisation URL recorded, VERIFIED existence only. The Valencia Balneis manuscript and the Tacuinum sanitatis are not in the material — gap.

Concrete analysis. The claim that f78v and f81r are one design is testable on the images: extract the painted water mask on each page (section 5), register the outer edges, and measure continuity of the water channel at the gutter (position and width of the channel where it meets the page edge). Null: the same continuity score for all other Q13 page pairs that are not claimed to join; the claimed pair should be an outlier. Extend to all Q13 pages to search for further joins — this is the image-side counterpart of the codicological reordering problem.

1.4 Herbals

Zandbergen (VERIFIED) summarises: the Tractatus de herbis tradition (Salerno, 13th/14th c.; north-Italian Tractatus and French Livre des simples médecines branches); "alchemical herbals" (north Italy, late 14th–early 16th c.; Toresella 1995 first noted the similarity; Segre Rutz 2000 the main reference; summary at philipneal.net/voynichsources/alchemical/); Touwaide 2016 compared the Voynich plants with two Tractatus herbals; Zandbergen 2012 (Villa Mondragone centennial) found Voynich outlines more detailed than the alchemical herbals. The f35v drawing closely resembles Paris BnF lat. 6823 fol. 60r (the "ivy" comparison); Zandbergen judges the Voynich drawing was probably inspired by a similar image elsewhere rather than by this manuscript. Historical identifications by Theodore Petersen and Ethel Voynich are collected at voynich.nu/extra/herb_oldid.html (VERIFIED URL). O'Neill 1944 (sunflower, pepper) is not generally accepted. Gheuens & Rapaport (2024) identified drawing details that sort with Currier A vs B pages, blog herculeaf.wordpress.com/2024/04/17/ (VERIFIED second-hand). The f37v plant and item 203 on f102r1 are the same plant (VERIFIED second-hand). Egerton 747, Morgan M.873 and the "recent plant identification papers" are not in the material beyond search hits (Egerton 747: BL catalogue record searcharchives.bl.uk/catalog/032-001983805, a Pittsburgh facsimile page; no IIIF manifest recorded) — gap. For BnF lat. 6823 the Biblissima record https://biblissima.demo.logilab.fr/en/ark:/43093/mdata0b8f98775999f574ebceaabbe75a7bff14324f67 was found (VERIFIED URL) but the fetch was not completed, so no Gallica ark is recorded; a Gallica manifest tried under ark:/12148/btv1b6000975z returned 403 and its identity is UNVERIFIED.

Concrete analysis. Two things are measurable without any comparandum: (a) intra-manuscript plant duplicates (f37v = f102r1 item 203 is the seed case): segment every herbal plant and every pharma fragment, compute shape descriptors (Hu moments, Zernike, or a learned embedding of the ink mask), and rank all herbal × fragment pairs; null = the distribution of similarity across all pairs, with the known pair as positive control. (b) The Gheuens–Rapaport A/B drawing-feature claim: code the features they name for all herbal pages and test association with Currier language by Fisher's exact test, with a permutation of page labels as null. For the BnF lat. 6823 fol. 60r comparison, once an image is obtained, the honest measurement is contour similarity of the f35v plant against fol. 60r and against every other plant in lat. 6823: the claim is only meaningful if fol. 60r is an outlier.

1.5 The rosettes foldout (f85v–f86r)

Zandbergen (VERIFIED): nine connected circles plus four corner items; many buildings, one reminiscent of a north-Italian castle; a T-O map in the upper right corner; central circle with six tower-like structures supporting a star-filled plane. Pelling's survey of interpretations, https://ciphermysteries.com/2010/05/29/a-miscellany-of-nine-rosette-links — VERIFIED (fetched; first 100k characters). It lists Brumbaugh (clock), D'Imperio 1977 (alchemical signs; central towers as six jars), Stevens 2008 and Grove 2002 (map), Pelling 2006 (Milan castle with Ghibelline swallow-tail merlons; Pavia; Venice), Lockerby (Baghdad), Han (Tycho's Hven), SantaColoma (3D terrain), "Diane" (Mount Meru), Wastl & Feger 2014, Knowles 2017 (Council of Basel itinerary), and others. Hildegard of Bingen does not appear in the fetched text — the "rosettes = Hildegard" comparison is UNVERIFIED in this survey. Pelling's own position: the swallow-tail merlons are a Guelph/Ghibelline political signal and a dating clue, and he flags that Bellinzona's walls may have received swallow-tails under Francesco Sforza, which "should be testable."

Wastl & Feger, "VM408 folio86v 'The Rosette Map': Elements of a mappa mundi and a map of the Elements", figshare article 903756, posted 2014-02-07, with a summary figure at figshare 939437 — VERIFIED (fetched; DOI not shown in the fetched text). They read the folio as four continents + four elements, each tied to a climate and cardinal direction, i.e. a model of the medieval cosmos. Status: proposed; no competing hypothesis has been tested against it.

Concrete analysis. The one defensible image measurement here is the graph: annotate each rosette and corner item as a node with attributes (radius, centre, fill motif, number of radial text lines, building count, star count) and each pipe/causeway as an edge with endpoints and width. The resulting graph is a publishable figure and a data object other researchers can reuse; by itself it decides nothing. What can be tested: whether radial text in each rosette reads in a consistent rotational direction (clockwise walk hypothesis, Grove), by measuring glyph baseline orientation around each ring; and whether the T-O corner's orientation (which segment is largest) matches the standard east-up convention (Alipov's observation of a swapped Europe/Africa is reported second-hand). Downloaded 2000 px images are too coarse for this foldout (native 7925×7268; see section 5); fetch native tiles.

1.6 Pharmaceutical containers (Q15, Q19)

Zandbergen (VERIFIED): three bifolios, containers on the left, 57 rows of herb fragments on the right; Petersen numbered 241 fragments ("possibly two too many"); container forms range from two or three stacked cylinders to complex lidded, footed vessels, some holding coloured liquid; proposed order of increasing complexity Q19 inner → Q19 outer → Q15 inner; section apparently unfinished; the simplest containers have been compared to early microscopes (proto57 blog) and to cannon in Pisanello's Codex Vallardi 2293 (Velinska, Zandbergen). Rene's "container page" and apothecary/albarello comparisons were not fetched — gap.

Concrete analysis. Container morphology is a clean image-coding task: for each container record height, width, number of tiers, lid, foot, fill colour, ornament density (ink pixels per unit area of the container mask). Test the "increasing complexity" ordering: is ornament density or tier count monotone with the proposed bifolio order, and is that monotonicity rarer under random orderings of the six pages? Also test whether container attributes predict the first word of the adjacent label line (a long-standing informal claim that labels "name" containers); null = shuffle labels among containers within a page.

1.7 Stars in the recipes section (Q20, f58)

Zandbergen (VERIFIED): 23 text-only pages with marginal stars; stars have 7 or 8 points; some red, some with red or faded-yellow centres, some with an ink dot; tails on all folios except the f103/f116 bifolio; usually one star per short paragraph; running text on f108v, f111 and f116r; f106r has a small companion star.

Concrete analysis. Fully automatable: template-match stars (two templates, 7- and 8-point), classify fill (red / yellow / dot / none) from Lab chroma inside the star mask, detect tails by a thin elongated component attached to the star, and record paragraph boundaries from line spacing. Hypotheses: (a) star attributes are not random across the section (e.g. red-centred stars cluster by bifolio — would support paint campaigns rather than content); (b) attributes correlate with paragraph properties (length, first word). Null: shuffle attributes among stars within a page (controls for page-level paint differences) and across the section. The tail/no-tail split on the f103/f116 bifolio already looks like a bifolio-level artefact; the test is whether other attributes show the same structure.

1.8 Marginalia, f116v, f1r

f116v ("michitonese"). Johannes Albus's reading (Voynich 100 conference, Frascati, May 2012) as reported by Bax, https://stephenbax.net/?p=2071 — VERIFIED (fetched): lines 1–3 Latin, line 4 German, a remedy involving goat's liver, oil, wax and goat's milk; transcription "poxleber umen[do] putriter / + an[te] chiton olei dabas + multas + ... / fix[a] + man[nipulis] IX + mor[sulis] IX + vix + alt[e]ra + matura + / ... pals [ein]en pbrey so nim[m] gei[s]smi[l]ch O". Line 4 has two Voynichese words. Bax: impressed, especially given the goat drawn in the margin; a Latin-then-German split is more convincing than mixed lines. Anton Alipov's reading does not appear in the material — UNVERIFIED. Davis 2024 MSI on f116v (section 2): writing similar to but not identical with Voynichese, Germanic features, roughly contemporary or somewhat later; several top-line words once read as beginning with p may begin with u or v; some "ink" lines are stains.

f1r. See section 2: Tepenecz inscription now legible; three right-margin columns attributed to Marci, 1662–65.

f17r. Davis: processed MSI images may help; same hand as f116v (VERIFIED). f66r, f49v column, f76r margin letters, colour annotations ("rot", "por", "g"), quire and folio numbers, month names. The voynich.nu marginalia page (voynich.nu/extra/marginalia.html) failed to fetch, and nothing else in the material covers these — gap. Pelling's 2011 colour post (section 3.3) does not mention the colour annotations either.

Concrete analysis. For hands: crop every non-Voynichese marginal item (f1r columns, f17r, f66r, f116v, quire and folio numbers, month names) at native resolution and compute stroke-level features (stroke width distribution via distance transform, slant, ascender/descender ratios, loop closure). Cluster, with the known Marci letter hand (APUG 557 fol. 127r, per Davis) as an external reference if an image is obtainable. This reproduces Davis's four-marker comparison quantitatively. Null: within-hand variation measured on a single known hand's letter.

2. Multispectral imaging (Davis, Lazarus Project)

Primary source: Lisa Fagin Davis, "Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript", Manuscript Road Trip, 8 Sept 2024, https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispectral-imaging-and-the-voynich-manuscript/ — VERIFIED (fetched). Secondary: medievalists.net 2024/09 and The Art Newspaper 2024-09-25 — VERIFIED (first fetched, second URL seen).

Established facts from the post:

• Imaged in 2014 at the Beinecke by the Lazarus Project (Michael Phelps, Gregory Heyworth, Chet Van Duzer, Ken Boydston, Roger Easton). Monochrome camera, narrow-band LED illumination UV to IR, Spectralon calibration; processing by Easton (MNF, PCA, ICA, spectral angle mapping, plus Photoshop hue adjustment); some pages reprocessed September 2024. Credit: The Lazarus Project and RIT's Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science.
• Folios: 1r, 8r, 17r, 26r, 47r, 70v1, 71r, 93r, 102v1, 116v (10 folios). Davis notes other pages may have been imaged.
• f1r: Tepenecz inscription ("Jacobi à Tepenecz") now legible beneath Voynich's c. 1914 reagent stain; three right-margin columns (Roman a–z, Voynichese characters, Roman alphabet offset by one) in a humanistic bookhand best matched to Johannes Marcus Marci (letter of 12 Sept 1640, APUG 557 fol. 127r; four markers: loopless ascenders, open-bowl g, m with taller first stroke, distinctive z), dated 1662–65; two Voynichese "majuscule" glyphs unique to this page; several Voynichese characters legible only under UV; show-through from the f1v green leaf digitally subtracted by Bill Endres.
• No palimpsest/underwriting anywhere imaged.
• f26r: mirror-image offset of f25v visible only under MSI; copper-green show-through from f26v; an unexplained semicircle in a yellow box inside the upper-margin waterstain.
• f70v1: faint blue inverted text is show-through from f70r1, not hidden text.
• f71r: the only zodiac page with significant colour, suspected later; turquoise and green respond differently under MSI (turquoise → bright yellow, green → light blue); not covered by the 2009 XRF study.
• f93r: stain and flower pigment respond identically (spill); text written over the stain — supports painting before writing on that page.
• f102v1: drawing beneath a rust stain; obscured text on the blue part of a vessel; faded text on a damaged fold.
• Data: Google Drive folder (Lab true-colour TIFFs, processed images, raw 16-bit TIFFs, RGB JPEGs). The blog gives https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mNQGKQDSCR4M_c2M2JrsU5soghvYwMig; the medievalists.net article gives a different folder id (1BFwNZTgLqvgnIU8rmXQCdW6kIuC4baS7). Both VERIFIED as printed; which is current is not established.

2025: Davis, "The Materiality of the Voynich Manuscript", talk to the University of Toronto Medieval Studies department, video youtube.com/embed/nH28ltqYIyo, reported by Pelling, https://ciphermysteries.com/2025/10/11/lisa-fagin-davis-the-materiality-of-the-voynich-manuscript — VERIFIED (fetched; second-hand for Davis's content). Reported content: new XRF imaging from Yale of both sides of f1 shows Marci's column ink is zinc-heavy rather than iron-heavy and that Voynich's reagent was sulphur-based; an ongoing project uses receding waterstains at the top of early pages to weakly predict original bifolio nesting; LSA text similarity is used to test page adjacency in Q13 and Q20; parts of the manuscript, including Q20, may have been "singulions" (single-bifolium quires), which Davis offers as an alternative to Pelling's 2006 Q13 bifolio-reversal claim. A paper by Davis and a co-author ("Colin") is said to be forthcoming with code and data on GitHub — UNVERIFIED beyond this report. Pelling's follow-up: https://ciphermysteries.com/2025/10/25/jehan-le-begue-giovanni-alcherio-villela-petit-quaterni-fascicular-culture-and-lisa-fagin-davis (VERIFIED URL, not fetched). No peer-reviewed MSI publication for 2025–26 was found in the material.

What this means for the RGB-only program. The MSI/XRF results are the ground truth that RGB measurements must defer to: (a) the "painted before written" sequence has physical support on f93r only; (b) copper-green show-through is strong enough to contaminate colour measurements on the verso/facing page — any paint-transfer analysis must mask show-through using the mirrored facing page; (c) f71r is a flagged candidate for a later paint campaign; (d) f1r margin content is settled by MSI/XRF and not worth RGB effort. The Drive TIFFs for the 10 folios are a calibration set: for those pages one can check how well RGB-derived pigment clusters (section 5) agree with MSI band responses.

3. Computational methods for diagram and symbology analysis

3.1 Graph representation of diagrammatic pages

Not covered by the collected material beyond Zandbergen's structural description of the rosettes. Method is straightforward: a hand-annotated node/edge list (rosettes, corner items, pipes, causeways; for Q13, pools, pipes, nymph groups, flow direction) stored as JSON-LD/IIIF annotations with region coordinates, rendered with networkx/graphviz over the page image. Value is reproducibility and figure-making, not hypothesis testing (see 1.5).

3.2 Glyph extraction and clustering

Davis, "How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript", Manuscript Studies vol. 5 no. 1, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754633 and https://repository.upenn.edu/mss_sims/vol5/iss1/6 — VERIFIED URLs (search result; not fetched; year not captured). This is the reference point for scribe attribution (Davis identifies multiple scribal hands; count and page assignments not captured here — UNVERIFIED details). Other computational hits from the search, content not examined: ceur-ws.org/Vol-3643/paper10.pdf; arXiv 1604.04149; arXiv 2505.02261; University of Adelaide student project "Cracking the Voynich code" (2014). Transkribus, Kraken, Stolfi's glyph work, "VoynichOCR" and the Archetype tool are not in the material — gap; they are named here as the obvious tooling (Kraken for line segmentation and training a Voynichese model; Archetype for annotation), without citations.

At the available resolution (section 5) glyph work needs native tiles. Pipeline: Kraken or a Sauvola binarisation plus connected components on the ink mask; crop components; features = HOG or a small autoencoder; cluster (HDBSCAN); align clusters to EVA transcription tokens by line-order matching. Tests: whether cluster membership separates by Davis's scribes (null: scribe labels permuted across pages); whether EVA "variants" (e.g. the several forms transcribed as a single EVA letter) form stable sub-clusters, which bears on alphabet size.

3.3 Colour and paint campaigns

Pelling, "Voynich colour inference: a sure path to madness", https://ciphermysteries.com/2011/12/20/voynich-colour-inference-a-sure-path-to-madness — VERIFIED (fetched). Pelling credits Jorge Stolfi with the "heavy painter" hypothesis: paints vary in material and skill, and a heavy painter added paint possibly a century or more after the original. Pelling's evidence: bifolios and quires were scrambled, yet nearly all paint transfers are between pages in their current order, so much of the paint post-dates the scrambling; he reconstructs f84v as originally facing f78r and argues the faded blue pools are original and the vivid greens later. He names the 2009 XRF report only indirectly (Davis's post cites it: pigments consistent with medieval recipes; green is copper-based). Stolfi's own statement was not fetched — VERIFIED second-hand. The "rot"/"por"/"g" colour annotations are not in the material — gap.

What RGB can and cannot do: it cannot identify pigments. It can (a) cluster paint regions by Lab colour after per-page parchment white-balancing, (b) measure paint transfer between facing pages (mirror-registered chroma correlation inside paint masks), and (c) measure whether paint overlies ink (ink mask under paint: paint-over-ink shows reduced ink contrast and colour-tinted ink pixels along strokes). The paint-transfer test is the one that bears directly on Pelling's claim and on page order; it is the single most valuable colour analysis (section 7, item 1).

3.4 Layout analysis

Not covered by the material. Measurable: for every text line on a page with a drawing, the distance from line end to the nearest drawing boundary and the deviation of the line's right edge from the page's text-block right edge. If text wraps around drawings (drawing-first), line-end positions will track the drawing contour; if drawings were squeezed into pre-existing text, text-block edges will be straight and drawings will show cut-offs at text. f93r (MSI) is the positive control for drawing-first. The "line is a unit" claim is a text-statistical claim; its visual counterpart is whether line-final and line-initial glyph shapes differ (tested via 3.2).

3.5 Counting

Star and nymph counts per ring are already tabulated by Zandbergen (30 / 15). Automated counting serves as a check and gives positions (angle, radius) for each figure, which the paranatellonta and "ring order" tests need.

3.6 Figure-attribute coding

No database of the ~500 figures with attributes was found in the material — gap (it is possible one exists on voynich.nu or voynich.ninja; UNVERIFIED). The schema that would make the zodiac/Q13 figures analysable: page, ring, index (clockwise from a fixed reference), angle, radius, sex marker, nude/clothed, headdress type, arm pose (left/right: raised, holding star, on hip, pointing), star present and its form, barrel/tub present, label present and its EVA transcription. ~550 records; manual coding in a IIIF-annotation tool (Mirador with the annotation plugin, or a simple HTML overlay) with region boxes so each record links to pixels.

3.7 Iconographic vocabularies and annotation tools

The Warburg Institute Iconographic Database is cited by Ponzi as a source of his features (VERIFIED second-hand); Saxl/Schedel references are not in the material. Jason Davies's viewer, https://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/ (VERIFIED URL via voynich.nu) and Zandbergen's per-folio pages (voynich.nu/folios.html) are the existing navigation layers. IIIF annotation (W3C Web Annotation on the Yale canvases) is the right storage for every region-level observation in this program, because it ties each coded attribute to a canvas id and pixel region that others can open in Mirador.

4. Public machine-readable comparanda

| Manuscript | Repository / shelfmark | Machine-readable access | Status | |---|---|---|---| | Voynich MS | Yale Beinecke MS 408 | IIIF Presentation 3 manifest https://collections.library.yale.edu/manifests/2002046 (also .json); 213 canvases; Image API 2 level2 per canvas, e.g. https://collections.library.yale.edu/iiif/2/1006076 (f1r); full TIFF at https://collections.library.yale.edu/download/tiff/{oid}; tiles 512 px, scale factors 1–32, maxArea 11,328,315 px | VERIFIED (fetched, HTTP 200) | | Paranatellonta images | BAV Reg. lat. 1283 (pt. A) | https://digi.vatlib.it/iiif/MSS_Reg.lat.1283.pt.A/manifest.json | VERIFIED (HTTP 200) | | De balneis Puteolanis | BAV Ross. 379 | https://digi.vatlib.it/iiif/MSS_Ross.379/manifest.json; view pages /view/MSS_Ross.379/0063, 0075, 0083, 0095 | VERIFIED (HTTP 200) | | Tractatus de herbis | BnF lat. 6823 | Biblissima record https://biblissima.demo.logilab.fr/en/ark:/43093/mdata0b8f98775999f574ebceaabbe75a7bff14324f67 ; Gallica ark not captured | Record VERIFIED; manifest UNVERIFIED | | Tractatus de herbis | Morgan M.873 | https://www.themorgan.org/sites/default/files/manifest/m873.json returned 403 | URL seen, access UNVERIFIED | | Tractatus de herbis | BL Egerton 747 | catalogue record https://searcharchives.bl.uk/catalog/032-001983805 ; no IIIF manifest captured | UNVERIFIED | | Zodiac, Ponzi's 70% match | Heidelberg Cod. Pal. germ. 298 | https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg298 answered with a bot-protection page | URL responds; content UNVERIFIED | | Zodiac, Ponzi's 80% match | ÖNB cod. 1842 | none captured | UNVERIFIED | | Lauber advertisement | Heidelberg Cod. Pal. germ. 314 | none captured | UNVERIFIED | | De balneis Puteolanis | Biblioteca Angelica 1474 | none captured (library page bibliotecaangelica.cultura.gov.it/en/?p=261417 seen) | UNVERIFIED | | Bodleian zodiac manuscripts | — | a guessed Bodleian manifest returned 404; nothing usable | UNVERIFIED |

Practical note: Gallica, the Morgan and Heidelberg all block or throttle non-browser clients; fetch manifests with a browser User-Agent and rate-limit, or download through a browser session.

5. What can be measured on the Yale images, and with what controls

Resolution. Native canvases are about 2700–3000 × 3700–3800 px for a 225 × 160 mm leaf, roughly 16 px/mm. The downloaded 2000 px JPEGs are therefore about 8–9 px/mm for ordinary folios: a nymph (15–25 mm) is 130–220 px tall, adequate for pose and attribute coding, star detection, paint masks and layout; a glyph (3–4 mm) is ~30 px, marginal for shape clustering. The foldouts are much coarser: f85v–86r (native 7925 × 7268) comes out at ~4 px/mm, f88v–89r (9078 wide) at ~3 px/mm. Rule: use the 2000 px set for page-level masks, counts, colour and layout; fetch native-resolution regions through the Image API (/iiif/2/{oid}/{x},{y},{w},{h}/full/0/default.jpg) for glyphs, marginalia hands and the foldouts. The maxArea limit equals the largest ordinary canvas, so full-size requests work for ordinary leaves; foldouts must be tiled.

Preprocessing (shared by every analysis).

1. Parchment mask: Lab conversion, Otsu on L with a chroma gate, largest connected component, hole-filling; exclude the colour chart and ruler by position.
2. Per-page white balance: scale channels so the parchment median is neutral; store the raw parchment median as a page covariate (photographic conditions vary; this covariate must enter every cross-page colour model).
3. Ink mask: Sauvola threshold on L within the parchment mask, with chroma below a threshold (so coloured paint is excluded).
4. Paint mask: chroma above threshold; cluster Lab values with k-means or GMM per page, then across pages after white-balancing; keep cluster centroids and per-page counts.
5. Show-through mask: mirror the facing page's paint mask horizontally, register by page corners, dilate; subtract from the current page's paint mask (Davis's f26r/f70v1 findings show this is not optional for copper green).
6. Text-line detection: horizontal projection of the ink mask within text blocks, or Kraken's segmenter; store baselines as polylines.
7. Everything saved as IIIF annotations keyed to canvas id and region, plus a flat CSV.

Null models and controls, by measurement type.

• Counts (stars, nymphs, containers, fragments): control = Zandbergen's and Petersen's published counts; disagreement is a detector error until inspected.
• Colour clusters: the 10 MSI folios (Drive TIFFs) and the 2009 XRF folios are the positive controls; a cluster that splits where MSI shows two responses (f71r turquoise vs green) is credible, one that does not is not.
• Paint transfer: for each facing pair in current binding, compute chroma correlation between page A's paint mask and the mirrored paint mask of page B, excluding show-through; null = the same statistic for (a) all non-facing pairs within the same quire and (b) 1,000 random page pairs. Then repeat for the pairs that would face under each proposed reordering (Pelling's Q13 reconstruction, Davis's singulions); the hypothesis "paint post-dates scrambling" predicts high transfer for current pairs and chance-level for reconstructed pairs; "paint is original" predicts the opposite.
• Attribute association tests (nymph pose vs label, container form vs label, star form vs paragraph): permutation of labels within page (controls for page-level effects), then across the section.
• Shape similarity (plant duplicates, zodiac comparanda): the full pairwise similarity distribution is the null; a claimed match must be an outlier in its row and column, not merely "similar."
• Layout (line-end vs drawing boundary): text-only pages (Q20) give the baseline distribution of line-end positions; drawing pages are compared against it.
• Hand clustering: within-hand variance from a single long sample (e.g. all Q20 text for one scribe, or the Marci letter if obtainable) sets the scale against which "different hand" is judged.

6. Gaps the collected material does not cover

Astrolabium planum (Engel 1488) and Picatrix images; Angelica 1474 and Valencia Balneis digitisations; Tacuinum sanitatis; Egerton 747 and Morgan M.873 access; "alchemical herbals" primary literature (Segre Rutz 2000 bibliographic details); recent plant-identification papers; "rosettes = Hildegard"; Rene's container page and albarello comparisons; Anton Alipov's f116v reading; f66r, f49v, f76r; the colour annotations; quire and folio number hands; Warburg/Saxl/Schedel; Transkribus/Kraken/Stolfi/VoynichOCR/Archetype; any existing figure-attribute database. None of these is filled from memory above; each is flagged UNVERIFIED where it is mentioned at all.

7. Ranked top-10 image/symbology analyses

1. Paint-transfer map against current and reconstructed page order (≈40 h). Hypothesis: most paint post-dates the scrambling of bifolios (Stolfi/Pelling "heavy painter"), which if true means colour cannot be used for authorial inference and, conversely, that transfer patterns can date paint campaigns relative to binding events. Data: all facing pairs from the Yale manifest order; paint masks with show-through subtracted; Pelling's Q13 reconstruction and Davis's singulion proposal as alternative pairings; f26r/f70v1 MSI as calibration. Null: non-facing and random pairs. Output: a transfer matrix (page × page) and per-pigment-cluster transfer rates. This is the one colour analysis with a clear prediction in both directions and existing physical calibration, and it feeds directly into the page-order question the book already raises.

2. Figure-attribute database for the ~550 zodiac and Q13 figures, with position (≈60 h coding + 15 h analysis). Hypotheses: (a) per-ring attribute entropy exceeds a pooled-draw null (paranatellonta/individuation vs decoration); (b) attributes track ring position; (c) attributes associate with label text (first glyph, Currier class). Data: coded schema (3.6) stored as IIIF annotations; EVA labels from the transcription. Null: permutations within page and across section. Nobody has published a tested version of the "each nymph is a degree" claim, and the database is reusable for every later figure question.

3. Q20 star census (≈12 h). Hypothesis: star form (points, fill, tail, companion) is structured by bifolio rather than by paragraph content, i.e. is a scribal/paint-campaign artefact. Data: template detection on the 23 pages plus f58; paragraph segmentation from line spacing; paragraph first words from the transcription. Null: attribute shuffles within page and across section. Cheap, fully automatic, and a clean small result either way; Zandbergen's tail observation on the f103/f116 bifolio is the seed.

4. Intra-manuscript plant duplicates: herbal plants × pharma fragments (≈30 h). Hypothesis: the pharma fragments are excerpts of the herbal plants (f37v = f102r1 item 203 is the known case), so a shape-similarity ranking should surface further pairs far above the pairwise null. Data: plant masks on all herbal pages, 241 fragment masks (Petersen's numbering as the index), contour and moment descriptors or an embedding. Null: full pairwise distribution; positive control the known pair. Any confirmed pairs link herbal text to pharma labels, which is new text-alignment data for the translation effort.

5. Rebuild Ponzi's 131 × 20 zodiac feature matrix as data and re-analyse (≈20 h). Hypothesis: the Voynich cycle's nearest neighbours are German/Alsatian at a distance that is unlikely under feature permutation. Data: Ponzi's post tables; independent re-scoring of the Voynich row from the Yale images; region and date covariates. Null: column-wise permutation; bootstrap over cycles. Turns the strongest existing localisation argument into a reproducible, figure-ready result and exposes which features carry the signal (crossbow, Gemini couple, duplicated Cancer).

6. Text-around-drawing layout statistics (≈25 h). Hypothesis: on herbal and Q13 pages, line ends track the drawing contour (drawing first), with f93r as positive control; the alternative (text first, drawings fitted) predicts straight text-block edges and drawing cut-offs. Data: baselines and line-end coordinates on every page with a drawing; drawing masks; Q20 text-only pages as the baseline distribution. Null: line-end variance on Q20. Also records, per line, whether the right margin is reached, a covariate the text-statistics work needs for "line as unit" analyses.

7. Container morphology and label association in Q15/Q19 (≈18 h). Hypothesis: container complexity is monotone with the proposed bifolio order (unfinished-section claim), and container attributes predict the adjacent label's first word. Data: container masks and attributes; label transcriptions. Null: random bifolio orders; label shuffles within page. Small, concrete, and directly interpretable for the book's pharma chapter.

8. Marginal hands clustering at native resolution (≈25 h). Hypothesis: f17r, f66r, f116v, the quire numbers, folio numbers and month names fall into a small number of hand clusters, with f17r and f116v together (Davis). Data: native-resolution crops via the Image API; stroke-width, slant and loop features; the Marci letter if an image is obtained. Null: within-hand variance from a single long sample. Quantifies what has only been argued by eye and makes the Marci attribution of the f1r columns checkable.

9. Q13 pool/pipe continuity across page edges (≈20 h). Hypothesis: f78v and f81r (and possibly other pairs) are halves of one design; continuity of water-channel position and width at the gutter should be an outlier for true joins. Data: water masks on all Q13 pages; edge profiles. Null: continuity scores for all non-claimed pairs. Independent, image-based evidence for Q13 reordering, complementing Davis's LSA and waterstain approaches.

10. Rosettes graph and radial-text direction (≈30 h, native tiles required). Hypothesis: radial text in each rosette reads in one consistent rotational direction (clockwise-walk reading), and the T-O corner's orientation follows the east-up convention. Data: node/edge annotation of the foldout; glyph baseline orientation sampled around each ring. Null: ring-by-ring direction under a fair coin. Mostly a publishable data object and figure; the directional test is the only part that decides anything, which is why it ranks last.

Total: roughly 300–330 hours, of which about a third is manual annotation that also produces reusable public data (IIIF annotations on the Yale canvases).