Fabrizio Salani | Voynich Portal

26 Nov 2024

This is the first time I’ve logged into my Voynich Portal account in 3.5 years. I couldn’t even remember my password. I’ve been fighting for democracy. All my research, hobbies, family relationships, all the things that matter to me, have been sidelined by the need to be actively engaged.

Time Lost

It was a crushing blow to set aside my research. After 13 years of basic legwork, I was making discoveries, exciting ones, and now all the emerging threads are moldering on an old hard drive that I pulled from a computer that I sold, with my paper notes gathering dust in the attic and under the bed. I feel like a small ship that lost everything in a bad storm, including the captain’s log and now, amidst an even bigger storm, I’m trying to find it all and drag it back into the boat.

Except I can’t. Not yet. There’s more work to be done on the home-front and it’s more urgent than ever.

A Token Note

I can’t pop in and out without at least posting something about the VMS. So maybe the most appropriate snippet is this… at the time I was forced to drop my Voynich research, in 2021, I was booking a trip to Europe. This is one of the more speculative parts of my research but I was itching to travel somewhere mysterious and beautiful, and I set my sights on Plitvice, the waters of the mysterious legend of the Black Queen.

I tentatively booked accommodation, selected a train pass, and was making a final decision between two air routes. I was long overdue for a vacation and wanted to see if there was a connection between the fabulous pools and falls in Plitvice and drawings in the Voynich Manuscript. I wanted to “walk the walk” and try to match up the connections on the “map” pages and “pool” pages with something real. I was forced to cancel all of it. I’m still longing to go there for both personal and academic reasons.

Summary

This is all I can post right now. I will try against all odds to drop in and get some of the more important VMS-related matters resolved (like my findings about the drawing that was located in Italy by F. Salani) but for now, duty calls.

J.K. Petersen

28 April 2021

More than five years, ago Fabrizio Salani purchased a drawing at a second-hand market in Italy that resembles a copy of a VMS plant, folio 14v. Rene Zandbergen provided a link to the drawing on the voynich.ninja forum. Unfortunately, the link is no longer active, but Salani later posted an interesting video about his discovery on youtube that is still available.

Deja Vu

When I saw the drawing, I immediately noticed something familiar, something I had noticed while cruising through plant drawings, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it. From that moment on, I was intrigued by the possibility of finding the illustrator and, after an extensive survey of medieval, Renaissance, and modern plant books, I located examples that have the same idiosyncrasies as the drawing purchased by Salani.

The Long Road Forward

The only reason it was possible to find the Salani illustrator is because he substituted his own style of root for the VMS root. The VMS drawing (right) has a crab-like root, painted a dark brick-red). The Salani root is more naturalistic. He also added an extra leaf which has some distinctive properties.

At the time we were alerted to the Salani drawing, I posted a few examples of roots on the voynich.ninja forum (02/12/16). I knew they were not the same illustrator, but I had a feeling they they might be approximately the same time period. I did not restrict my search to this period of history, however, but several years of research brought me back to it, time and time again, and it turned out to be the right ballpark.

The Salani drawing is not a slavish copy of the VMS plant, but it’s faithful enough that it cannot be a coincidence. Assuming the Salani illustrator copied the VMS (or copied a copy of the VMS) and not the other way around (which seems unlikely), he apparently did not think a 100% faithful copy was needed for whatever purpose he made the copy.

Voynichese Characters

The VMS glyphs are not copied with complete accuracy either. They are mostly right, and even the way they cross the leaf has been honored, but there are some small discrepancies.

Guessing at the purpose of the copy is difficult, but my research on printing history revealed that Renaissance entrepreneurs scrambled to gather up manuscripts that they could turn into printed books. Perhaps there was a period in the life of the VMS when someone thought it might be worthy of print reproduction. If so, this may have occurred during the “dark” portion of the VMS provenance.

Another possibility is that the copy represents one of the events documented in letters about the VMS between the Jesuits who had it in their possession before Wilfrid Voynich acquired it. There is mention of a copy (the current owner apparently didn’t want to give up the whole manuscript). I will discuss this in future posts because this is only valid if the active life of the illustrator synchs up with the dates of the letters.

Summary

I will share more about this intriguing discovery in future blogs, but for now, here is a small portion of a chart I created as I was searching for the illustrator and, more importantly searching for corroborating evidence to pinpoint the dates during which he was active and who he associated with at the time.

Chart Documenting Illustrator for Fabrizio Salani drawing — J.K. Petersen chart documenting connections to the illustrator who apparently created the Fabrizio Salani drawing

I will post close-ups at a future date (this is a teaser since it’s not possible to explain the whole chart without close-ups that show the connections).

J.K. Petersen

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