![]() ![]() The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain joins forces with nonprofit The World Around Like the Madison Avenue shop, the interiors come courtesy of local AD100 designer Steven Gambrel, who glamorously mixed a swath of antiqued pink glass with Venetian plaster, padded velvet, and red lacquered chandeliers. After nearly a decade on Broome Street, former fashion editor Beth Buccini has relocated her vibrant downtown retail emporium (there are also stores on the Upper East Side and in East Hampton, Palm Beach, and Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) to a 6,000-square-foot space at 160 Mercer Street, close to the original. Kirna Zabête settles into new Steven Gambrel–designed Soho digsĮdgy, luxe womenswear from celebrated and on-the-rise designers alike has reeled shoppers into Kirna Zabête since the first boutique opened in New York’s Soho neighborhood in 1999. No doubt though, the illustrations are fascinating to look at.Kirna Zabête’s new Steven Gambrel–designed shop in SoHo Photo: Erik Dalzen According to Raymond Clemens, Curator for Early Books and Manuscripts at Beinecke Library, one theory suggests that it is the illustrated diary of a teenage space alien, who just happened to leave it behind.Īnother popular theory is that Wilfrid Voynich found some 15th century vellum and created the text and illustrations himself. ![]() He opined that it was a “compendium of information on herbal remedies, therapeutic bathing and astrological readings”, compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon – great aunt to Catherine of Aragon, in a lost proto-Romance language. Many have claimed to decipher it most claims have been discredited or disproved, including one made in May last year (2019) by Dr Gerard Cheshire from the University of Bristol. Others say it is too sophisticated to be one and have attributed the text to a wide range of languages from Old Cornish, to Old Turkish and even to the Aztec language of Nahuatl. Some claim it to be a hoax with no express purpose. However, countless theories to its provenance have abounded. Well, Wilfred Voynich himself thought that philosopher Roger Bacon wrote it. Voynich Manuscript Illustrations showing plant composites – Beinecke Library, Yale University Who wrote the Voynich manuscript? Marci eventually got it and sent it to a Jesuit scholar for decoding. Supposedly written by imperial physician Marcus Marci, the letter went on to claim that alchemist Georg Baresch subsequently owned it and tried to decipher the books contents. A letter attached to it, dated 1665, claimed that the book had belonged to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (r 1576 to 1612). He found the Manuscript outside a Jesuit seminary in Rome, during a book-buying trip in 1912 – and that’s how it got its name. He escaped and went to London, where he set up a second hand bookshop. Wilfrid Voynich was a Polish-Lithuanian book dealer, who was arrested and sent to Siberia for socialist activities in the late 19th century. The astronomical symbols could be related to medical practices of the period but most of the celestial bodies are not known to date. Attempts to identify most of the illustrated plants have failed, not least due to the confounding nature of many of the plant drawings, which look like composites: the roots of one species are attached to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third. The problem is that the puzzling text and illustrations have only fuelled countless theories about its purpose. It seems that it may have been a pharmacopoeia (book of medicine) to address issues and topics in medicine of that time. What was the purpose of the Voynich Manuscript? The aforementioned William Freidman led one effort in the 1940s, where each line of the manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card to make it machine-readable. Exclusive transcription alphabets were created to decode its language. In fact, William Freidman, the US Army Signal Intelligence Service’s chief cryptologist, spent 30 years trying to understand it. Even Alan Turing tried to decipher it, as did FBI operatives, linguists, mathematicians, and medieval scholars, with no success. Some drawings and text show retouching and the binding and covers were added later, but nothing further has been revealed of the secrets of its writing and illustrations. It has been subject to a wide range of 21 st century testing, leading to an understanding of the parchment, ink and paint. What makes the Voynich Manuscript intriguing is its unknown language (a left to right writing system), which has defied decoding by some of the greatest minds. Voynich Manuscript Text – Beinecke Library, Yale University ![]()
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