It is a delightful moment of Panofsky wit – but since none of the  cryptanalysts ‘got’ it and d’Imperio takes this answer at face value, as did Tiltman in 1968 and as current Voynich writers still do, I’ll spell  out Panofsky’s ‘dig’  briefly here, having already discussed the “sunflower in the Vms” issue in a separate Page.

You should know first that no-one took O’Neill’s ideas seriously at the time.  So, for example,  Nill, had said in writing to Salomon in the previous year (April 28th., 1953) telling him of it and saying, “We do not think it is a sunflower, and neither does Fr. Petersen.”

Here, in answer to question 3, Panofsky says he could go as far as ‘even the first years of the sixteenth century’. Normally that would mean not after 1510. (otherwise, you’d say ‘early decades…’

Now – see how his response to Question 8 says that the ‘sunflower’ is the only plant Panofsky ‘recognises’?  How can that be,  because what he has to recognise first is the style of drawing, and it’s not that of the European drawings of the sunflower, the first of which appears in Dodoens’ book of 1568 – as Panofsky surely knew.  The illustration had even been reproduced as recently as 1951 in an American journal. (see below)

Is Panofsky confused?… I don’t think so…  because here’s the thing. … Dodoens described the plant as  ‘Peruvian Chrysanthemum’. And guess when Europeans first invaded Peru.?..  yep.  1510.  … Talk about ‘fairly provincial….’ 🙂

So as I read it, Panofsky’s underlying message is:  “If that’s a sunflower, I’m a Dutchman”.. or a Peruvian.  [yes, I know Dodoens was actually a Fleming… and we shouldn’t take ‘Peruvian’ too literally. But that’s how it was described by Dodoens and for some time afterwards]

So Panofsky’s pulling Friedman’s leg, knowing perfectly well that Friedman won’t realise it.  There’s no other  way to reconcile the answers given to questions 3 and 8 save a  tongue-in-cheek logic which implies that for a manuscript to be ‘no later than the first years of the sixteenth century’ AND to show the ‘Peruvian chrysanthemum’ the draughtsman would have to be in Peru.

… Dodoens wasn’t born until 1517.

Luckily, Panofsky was not to see Tucker and Janick later insisting (Springer, 2018) that O’Neill was right  to imagine a sunflower in the Voynich manuscript, and further that Voynichese was – if not Peruvian –  some lost dialect of Nahuatl. On the other hand, I think Magnus Pharao Hansen’s swift, cool and learned rebuttal of their ‘Nahuatl-dialect’ argument might have pleased the Professor well. ( And really – the Voynich-books coming out of Springer of late make one wonder what that press is coming to!)

• Hugh O’Neill, ‘Botanical Observations on the Voynich MS.’, Speculum, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Jan., 1944).
• Charles B. Heiser, Jr., ‘The Sunflower among the North American Indians’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Aug. 17, 1951), pp. 432-448.
• Charles B. Heiser, Jnr.,  ‘Origin and Development of the Cultivated Sunflower’, The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 17, No. 5 (May, 1955), pp. 161-167.

But (now on the alert) back to the responses…

Panofsky indicates the criteria for dating content in a manuscript, but says nothing specific. Without further explanations given – or asked – the answer is one that would apply equally to whatever dates a person offered for any manuscript….We need to know how the ‘character of the script’ is perceived to accord with posited dates and, as importantly, with those of the place to which the item is being ascribed.  The ‘style of drawing’, similarly… And just which dates (1470 or 1520 here, or fourteenth century as offered in 1931 1932) does he really think confirmed by the costume? He says the manuscript displays nothing of  Italian Renaissance character.

The majority of more recent writers, however, who have shared with us their perception of the figures’ costumes  argue that they are High [and thus Italian] Renaissance. To be clear, it is a position which the present writer does not share.  However, most recent writers have also focused to a surprising degree, almost obsessive, on the calendar’s  ‘Archer’ emblem where Panofsky draws attention instead to   f.72r,    Once again, it seems to me,  Panofsky is making an oblique joke at Friedman’s expense though – I sense – also offering a genuine bit of information even if only for the specialist in philology and comparative palaeography.

‘Before the manuscript has been decoded’ is a slightly mocking comment; Panofsky’s life was spent ‘decoding’ pictures, for many of which no accompanying text was present. The error of supposing imagery’s understanding depends on accompanying text is another of those nonsensical ideas endemic in Voynich studies, and will be asserted by persons who, not knowing a word of Latin, still hunt manuscripts for images which they expect to find legible… and, of course, do find legible in a way they never find imagery from the Vms legible.

The lesson which should be taken from this is that (a) when imagery derives from a familiar culture, it is legible and (b) when it is not legible it’s not because some accompanying text can’t be read.

The fact is that Friedman did presume all about the manuscript was dependent on the text’s translation, and in 2008, when the present writer first came to the study and began explaining the imagery in terms of cultural and stylistic expression, she was informed that all comments on the imagery were “personal and subjective” or “theoretical” and that nothing certain could be said until the written part of the text had been read.

As to Panofsky’s speaking of “general cosmological philosophy…” etc. –  he has made a fairly obvious collation, heaping together bits from Newbold’s paper of 1921, and  standard medieval ideas, but then ‘occulting’ them by means of what I’d describe as a  purple-prose code.  With delicious wit, he plays on ideas and terms proper to cryptography, while referencing medieval ideas and Newbold’s neo-Platonic speculations in a way you might well describe as contrapuntal.

Panofsky is verbose; he uses substitutions (e.g. “astral radiation” for al_Kindi’s radii stellarum; “spirits” for angels)… and so on.  This is typical of his multi-faceted commentaries on art and his well-known humour.

So now, bearing in mind that the figure from f.72r is likely to be ‘read’ by any European as bearing a magic wand, and that the Americans called ‘Magic’ the system of coded messages generated by the Japanese ‘purple’ machine – and Friedman’s involvement in breaking that cipher, so  Panofsky writes, verbose, with substitutions,  Magic-Purple (prose).. about the rotas of heaven and earth… combining individual ‘elements’ in various ways.. In short, envisaging a  cosmic, yet elegant, ‘enigma’.   Quite beautiful!

It wasn’t entirely nice of Panofsky, I suppose, to make sport of Friedman in that way, but it is a just parallel for the ‘sport’ which Friedman and his wife had made of Newbold.

Nor had Friedman quite broken ‘Purple’ before It had broken him.   His mind had given way in the first year of the war (1939) and while he was institutionalised, others in his team continued the work, with Lt.Francis A. Raven completing it.

about Raven: various sources refer to an NSA publication (issued online as pdf), some sources even including the link, but these do not seem to be current.  In case you may fare better, here are the details:

• Mowry, D. P., “Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series – Francis A. Raven.” NSA/Center for Cryptologic History, released Jun 12, 2009, FOIA Case# 52567.

Friedman again broke down while trying to ‘break’ the Voynich text, and again had to leave the effort to others including Tiltman and Currier.  In the end, the Voynich text defeated all who tried to ‘break it’, but those who – like Currier, Tiltman and others – were content to make  careful observations of script and text-distributions etc. did make a lasting contribution.

• Alberto Perez (Vanderbilt University), ‘Secrets Abroad: A History of the Japanese Purple Machine.’
• The Story of Magic: Memoirs of an American Cryptologic Pioneer, by Frank B. Rowlett (1998).

• a Friedman Bibliography from Muskingum University website: ‘The Literature of Intelligence: A Bibliography of Materials,with Essays, Reviews, and Comments by J. Ransom Clark.

To see how Panofsky’s response to Q.5 reprised Newbold’s ideas is easy enough; the resources are online.

Some may not be able to recognise the ‘purple prose’ encoding of ordinary medieval ideas, though, so here are a couple of passages showing how the virtu in things of earth, each conferred in its turn during the year,  was believed transmitted from the Divine to earth by the intermediary stars, identified by some Christians – and not by others – with the angels.  The first passage is chosen only because it’s the neatest, and despite  Tester’s having neglected to name the fifteenth-century German cleric who preached this:

As God gave their power to stones and to herbs and to words, so also he gave power to the stars, that they have power over all things, except over one thing. They have power over trees and over vines, over leaves and grasses, over vegetables and herbs, over grains and all such things; over the birds in the air, over the animals in the forests, and over the fishes in the waters and over the worms in the earth: over all such things that are under heaven, over them our Lord gave power to the stars, except over one thing. … man’s free will: over that no man has any authority save thyself.

• Berthold of Regensberg. Cited from Tester, A History of Western Astrology (1987) p.178.  edit Feb, 26th., 2019 – apologies to Tester; it was I who had omitted the speaker’s name from my own notes.

and see e.g. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1,  Q.73, Article 1, reply to Objection 3;

“…Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning…”

or even the 2nd C eastern Christian, Theophilus of Antioch, contemplating the year’s interlocked rotas:

Consider, O man, His works — the timely rotation of the seasons, and the changes of temperature; the regular march of the stars; the well-ordered course of days and nights, and months, and years; the various beauty of seeds, and plants, and fruits; and the various species of quadrupeds, and birds, and reptiles, and fishes, both of the rivers and of the sea; or consider the instinct implanted in these animals to beget and rear offspring, not for their own profit, but for the use of man; and the providence with which God provides…

and especially see:

• Edward Grant, chapter ‘Celestial Motion and its Causes’ in Grant, E., Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687. (1996)

and

• NB Alan B. Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars (OUP 1991)

Don’t overlook the first conditional: ‘remotely comparable’.  Again, Panofsky merely behaves as a Professor might towards a first-year student whose ‘theories’ outrun his basic knowledge.  Panofsky here declines to discuss a single image from the Vms, or a single manuscript as ‘comparison’ for it,  nor for a single detail in any drawing. As before, the basic message is, ‘Go away and read’.

So in this answer  – as I interpret it, anyway – Panofsky has no intention of doing more than pointing Friedman  towards basic texts and to certain individuals whose positions were secure.  Panofsky’s conferring a knighthood on Singer is either a mistake or, as I think, an oblique comment on Friedman’s social pretensions, acting (for that reason) as antidote to any assumption of Singer’s inferiority by reason of Jewish inheritance.  This bias is  clearly reflected, though probably unconsciously, in d’Imperio’s account of the cryptanalysts’  “plan of Attack” in her Table of Contents, which I’ll treat later.  Interestingly, Panofsky does not refer to Dorothea Singer, who was a fine medieval scholar, and who was referenced by Lynn Thorndike in 1921.  Charles Singer’s book of 1928, however, makes no mention of Thorndike even though the first and second volumes of Thorndike’s A History of Science and Experimental Magic had been published five years earlier, in 1923.

Charles Singer wrote studies in the history of medicine for the first part of his career and then turned to writing history – notably editing the encyclopaedic History of Technology. What Panofsky doesn’t say, and perhaps didn’t know, is that Singer also knew Hebrew, Greek and Latin.  He had been born in London. His father Simeon Singer was a rabbi and scholar. Singer was another scholar who had left his home to come with his wife in the 1930s to take up a post in America (UCLA), remaining until 1942. In that year, despite the great risk it entailed, he and his wife re-crossed the Atlantic to return to England. (British naval losses; American naval losses).

Singer’s ideas about the Voynich manuscript were apparently developed and communicated only by post and after 1954. What d’Imperio never says is whether such opinions were merely answers given a quiz such as that presented to Panofsky.  It is quite likely they were; by 1957 Singer was in England and Friedman shows no interest in reading or learning about medieval art and manuscripts; he likes to have others do that sort of work, and then extract from them answers to set questions of his own devising, in way suited to ‘number-crunching’ and puzzle solving. Friedman relied heavily on feeding quantifiable data-bites into a computer as a means to ‘break the text’. So I think it probable that, rather than buy and read the recommended books, Friedman simply contacted the  authors expecting short, easy answers to his own short, ‘baby-steps’ questions.

In Singer’s own Evolution of Anatomy, he says he will  omit …

“Paracelsus, and Helmont, and their followers, since the movement they represent did not become important until the second part of the seventeenth century”…

yet he opines to Friedman by letter (responding to a quiz?) that his vague ‘feeling’ is that the Voynich manuscript might be of a Paracelsan and occult-alchemical character, and composed by an ‘author’ living in sixteenth-century Prague.  As always, there seems to have been no effort made by the theorist to check whether their ideas were compatible with reality: that is, in this case, to see whether the manuscript’s materials, style of construction or ‘hand’  suited such an idea. (A: they don’t).

None of those “feelings”  which Singer says more than once are  vague impressions  finds support from the manuscript itself, but they have found  determined support among a group of Voynicheros whose members  are quite determined upon.

I find Singer’s testimony most interesting as one more of the many instances where a scholar of eminence and wide knowledge of European medieval works can suggest no manuscript at all as  close comparison for Beinecke MS 408.  This is a point so widely un-noticed, and still less rarely considered for its implications, that it deserves a post of its own. I’ll call it ‘Angels and Fools’.

Two volumes of essays, dedicated to Singer, had been published in the year before Friedman was introduced to Panofsky.

• E. Ashworth Underwood (ed.), Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on. the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice. Written in honour of Charles Singer.  Volumes I and Il. (1953).
• Geoffrey Keynes’ review for the British Medical Journal neatly describes Singer’s character and publications.  The British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 4873 (May 29, 1954), p. 1247.
• Charles Singer,  The Evolution of Anatomy: A Short History of Anatomical and Physiological Discovery to Harvey: Being the Substance of the Fitzpatrick Lectures Delivered at The Royal College of Physicians of London in the years 1923 and 1924.
• _______________, Studies in the history and method of science (1917)

Richard Georg [sometimes seen as George] Salomon (1894-1966) – converted to Christianity in 1902; escaped Nazi Germany in 1937.  At the University of Berlin, Salomon had studied eastern European history under Theodor Schiemann (1847-1921), Byzantine history under Karl Krumbacher (1856-1909), the history of medieval law under Karl Zeurmer (1849-1914), and Latin paleography under Michael Tangl (1861-1921), under whom he completed his doctoral dissertation in February 1907: Studien zur normannisch-italischen Diplomatik. His name was among the six (with Panofsky’s) listed for expulsion from Hamburg University in 1934.

Panofsky’s pointing Friedman in the  direction of these men, and texts, was not only wise, but kind. If all Friedman wanted was quiz-answers and easy ‘sound-bites’ the men might provide them; if he he was seriously interested in the manuscript as a late medieval product, studying the texts would begin his education.

Granted that Panofsky may, or may not, have agreed with Salomon’s reading of that marginalia – extraneous by definition to provenancing the manuscript’s original content as Panofsky realised (“The little figure …. may or may not refer to this idea”) – there has been a recurring discussion/dispute of Salomon’s reading, with Koen Gheuens’ summary of the ‘pro-‘ position neatly put and illustrated (together with his own thoughts) in his post of July 11th., 2017: Note also that Panofsky is as rigorous as ever in his principles  – attributing Salomon’s insights to their author; his very meticulousness in such matters permits us now to credit Panofsky with first attributing to a ‘regional French’ dialect (Occitan?) the inscriptions over the central emblems in the Voynich calendar.

Occitan became a topic on the first mailing list during discussion of a book whose narrative attributed this manuscript to the Cathars of Langedoc. The question of Occitan then became one in its own right.

• 1997 Dennis Stallings published a list of bibliographic and other items relating to Occitan in the first mailing list (10 Feb 1997) including the important note (which was later independently stated by Artur Sixto  in a comment to ciphermysteries, (February 17, 2011)  that Occitan and Catalan – or Judeo-Catalan – are closely similar.
• 2004 Shaun Palmer looked at the orthography in detail in 2004.
• 2009, Pelling credited Stolfi.   In other posts, Pelling thought it most like the dialect of Toulouse – though he may have changed his views since then.  Pelling first, and others including Don Hoffman later, noted a closely similar orthography on astrolabe inscriptions dating to c.1400.  I’ll return to this matter when we come to the astronomical themes.
• 2011 Artur Sixto’s comment was made (February 17, 2011) at ciphermysteries.com, saying he thought the forms closer to Judeo-Catalan, and commenting on use of that dialect among emigrees into north-western France. Because so many comments were made to the same post by Pelling I quote here the whole of Sixto’s comment:

Sixto wrote, “To me the months [names] seem to correspond slightly better to Catalan than Occitan. June for instance, spelled with “ou” corresponds to Catalan pronunciation, in French writing. “ny” would be Catalan relative to Occitan “nh” or French/Italian “gn”. So the person might have ties with the North of Catalonia (and could have a French influence) …. Interestingly, many Jews in Catalonia spoke Catalanic, a Catalan dialect close to Shuadit, i.e. Judaeo-Provençal (i.e. Judaeo-Occitan).”

• 2015 Commenting at Stephen Bax’s blog (May 18, 2015 – 11:14 pm) ‘Don of Tallahassee’ [Don Hoffman] noted similar forms for month-names used in Picardy, his examples taken from calendars in fifteenth-century Books of Hours.

Various others have reached similar opinions, often independently as a result of the ‘Voynich ground-hog day’ phenomenon.

On Salomon’s reading “der Mussteil,” see the  lucid commentary by Koen Gheuens:

• Koen Gheuens, ‘Der Musdel: Law in the Margins‘ (blogpost).

and

• Heidelberg University Library, UBH Cod.Pal.germ. 164 Heidelberger Sachsenspiegel (dated to 1305)
• Salomon had consulted several secondary sources  (which he cited in a letter of March 14th., 1936 to Panofsky or to Mrs.Voynich per Anne Nill), quoting in full an entry from:Der Sachsenspiegel (Landrecht) nach der ältesten Leipziger Handschrift herausgegeben von Prof. Dr. Julius Weiske. Neubearbeitet von weil. Professor Dr. Hildebrand. 8^th.ed. Leipzig, O.R. Reisland, 1905 (Glossary p.28.)

To this I should have protested at first – had I been there – that Professor Panofsky must be joking, but then asked more of what he thought that might imply, if he really meant it.

Infuriatingly, if this is another reprise of things he had said at the meeting, it is another case of Friedman’s “blind spot” at work.  An iconographic analyst of Panofsky’s calibre is (so to speak) the theoretical physicist of the art world; he has to know pretty much everything about everything expressed in visual form through the periods in which he specialises, and that includes the way plants and creatures are depicted in a given place at a given time AND what the depiction indicates about the signfiicance embedded in forms and details: that is, what non-superficial messages the image conveyed for persons of that time and environment.  He would have to know the traditions of the bestiaries as well as the place of a creature in the schemes of Christian theology and moralia, as well as classical Greek and Roman lore. And so too for plants: is a rose intended as allusion to the Virgin Mary; to ‘Roman de la Rose’; to the physical rosa mundi; to an intended parallel between the pure soul of Mary as antidote to spiritual ills and the Rose as supposed protection against Plague … and so forth. This issue of intended significance is the one most noticeable by its absence in writings by persons who claim to ‘analyse’ imagery but who know nothing about it.

As regards plants, Panofsky’s well-known statement that   “the rise of those particular branches of natural science which may be called observational or descriptive—zoology, botany, paleontology, several aspects of physics and, first and foremost, anatomy — was . . . directly predicated upon the rise of the representational techniques.” could not have been enunciated without a prior and thorough grounding in the way those fields of learning were illustrated before and during the period of the Renaissance.

• Erwin Panofsky, Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the “Renaissance-Dämmerung”, Lecture Given May 10, 1952 at the Fogg Museum Before the New England Conference on Renaissance-Studies. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1953). also included in Wallace K. Ferguson (et.al.), Six Essays on the Renaissance (1962).
• [pdf] Claudia Swan, ‘Illustrated Natural History’ in Susan Dackerman (ed.), Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge , exhibition catalogue, Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp.186-191.

On flowers, their perception, depiction and attitudes to cultivation from ancient to modern times, with emphasis on Europe’s medieval and Renaissance periods, see also

• Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (CUP Archive, 1993).
• reviewed by Chandra Mukerji in Theory and Society, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Aug., 1996), pp. 590-594

And quite apart from his professional studies, in which he discussed the symbolism intended by depiction of scarlet lilies, iris and honeysuckle, Panofsky’s correspondence shows a keen interest in the very practical aspect of botany: gardening.

Did he honestly mean that he could recognise not a single plant in the Vms?  Not even in 9v, with its widely-accepted representation of one or more members of the  viola-group?

• Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: its origins and character (1953) Vol. 1 pp. 333 and note 6 to p.416.

‘Nothing but the sunflower’?? Hmmmm.

I have no idea whether Panofsky really believed this. It echoes a view first put forward (whether Panofsky knew it or not) by Georg Baresch who said in his letter to Kircher,  “… it is not inconceivable that some good man…”.etc.   Panofsky does seem, overall, to have shared the usual assumption of contemporary and later Voynich writers in imagining the work to be all the  product of a single ‘author-artist’.  The solution to this problem may lie in that as-yet unseen report which Reeds mentioned in the 90s, and  described as written by Panofsky to Voynich.

• Letter of Georgius Barschius to Athanasius Kircher (1639). Transcription, translation and notes by Philip Neal.

I do not think anyone could mistake here the asperity with which Panofsky’s answers this question. His “I am afraid that I did not express myself with sufficient clarity’ is a very formal and very cold English- and European form of insult: there is everywhere a point at which extreme politeness becomes an insult.   In modern American the equivalent might be: ‘Are you a total fool?’  Panofsky’s then explaining, in words of one syllable, the importance of Mabillon’s book (of which no  genuine ‘student’ of medieval manuscripts could have passed three decades in ignorance), tells us yet again that Panofsky has been driven to the point of outrage: this is a venting of professorial wrath.   And, need I say, Friedman remained quite unable to weigh the relative merits of amateurs against specialists;  Panofsky had said, categorically, that the manuscript was genuine, and yet d’Imperio – who hasn’t any relevant training or experience to judge the matter – decides (as we see later) to keep the option open. The reason has nothing to do with the manuscript itself, but with two fixed yet unproven assertions: that the text is in cipher and that it is entirely the product of Latin (western) Christian culture.

“already mentioned twice.” (and doubtless also in the ‘conference’ shortly before).   Panofsky has now quite lost patience with Friedman and his  ‘quiz’.  That Panofsky omits mention of Charles (or of Dorothea) Singer here, again suggests that they had not yet, to his knowledge, been involved with the study.   Charles Singer’s opinions, as quoted by d’Imperio, come from letters dating to 1957 or so.

Panofsky’s comment about the dates being wrong for a deliberately-constructed artificial language (as such; not including newly-created scripts or alphabets to render a language) is absolutely right, and Friedman’s ignorance of even that – his own field – is once more evident.  It is another item in proof that Panofsky was already better acquainted with the history than was Friedman.  Panofsky also knows of O’Neill’s paper, published in 1944, though his knowledge of Alberti had long been part of his own scholarly repertoire. As, I expect, was his knowledge of medieval and Renaissance palaeography, essential to provenancing manuscripts and evinced by his familiarity with the books of which Friedman was still ignorant, though already had referred to them during their talk. His allusion to hieroglyphics is most likely to refer to the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo which has made such an impression on Dürer (among others). The edition by Boas includes some of Dürer’s drawings and an essay on the subject.

• George Boas (ed. and trans.), The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo. (Boas’ translation was first published in 1950 but my copy is the 1993 edition which I think to be preferred. It includes a new foreword by Anthony T. Grafton)