Nymphs bathing by Abraham van Coylenborch, 17th-century Flemish painting.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nSummary<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
I can’t tell if the top pool of the 84r is meant to be literal or allegorical, but I think there’s something extra going on in the arrangement of the nymphs. If it’s a literal representation, maybe the pool party included dancing. Dancing was a very popular form of entertainment before television was invented, and every well-born person was expected to know basic steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or maybe the nymphly poses are telling some kind of a story, as in the panels of Piramus and Tisbe. Either way, pictures of dancers with expressive gestures in the style of the VMS, set within archways, were not common in the early 15th century, so it might be significant that the closest parallel I have found so far for the gestures, was on a Byzantine sarcophagus that traveled from Rome, possibly through Paris, and eventually ended up in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
J.K. Petersen<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a9 Copyright 2019 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
27 June 2019 On folio 84r of the Voynich Manuscript, there is a drawing of textured niches, with a row of nymphs below its arches. Between groups of nymphs one might expect columns, but instead there are wavy lines painted blue, resembling a flow of liquid. The nymphs are thigh-deep in water that has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[385,384,383,382],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8064"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8064"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8316,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8064\/revisions\/8316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}