Page 80 - EXPOTIME!Sept2017

Fakes and forgeries — Illicit traffic of looted heritage

II of Hapsburg. Such a testimony was urgently needed,
because the said Kircher never reconfirmed the receipt
of the book; he had never responded to the request to
decipher the secret text, and in his numerous collection
catalogs there is no entry on the book.

All in all, these assertions are published uncritically by
many authors in the internet, but they are nothing but
nice stories, which are artfully woven against doubts.
Hard facts about the book look different, the actual ref-
erence of the mentioned side-etter to this book is not
given. One could even have used real documents to em-
bellish a counterfeit. The scientific detection of fakes
could start with these two documents (the ex-libris and
the side-letter), since an old insight of fake detection
says that if attached documents are falsified, it is most
likely that the core object in question is also fake. Some
years ago (and meanwhile revoked) was claimed, howev-
er, that the Beinecke library does not allow "physical or
7
chemical analysis". However, this is not valid anymore:
the results of such tests can be found in the English Wiki-
pedia entry. It seems that that typical old color and ink
8
recipies were used. This, however, does not tell us when
these old pigments and binders were applied, since, of
course, recent counterfeiters will be eager to provide
old parchment with old colours and inks. It is also im-
portant in this case to determine trace elements and to
publish the scientific studies themselves, and not just
the summarised results.

The strange side-letter fixed to the 18th cent. cover.
Source: Zandbergen

At this time, Marci was 71 years, a few months later he
deceased. He reports to Kircher that a certain Dr. Raph-
ael, being a Bohemian teacher at the Court of Ferdinand
III., had told him that the mysterious book was written
by Roger Bacon [who, however, lived in the 13th century
and thus could not have used a parchment of the fifteenth
century] and that it later came into the possession of the
alchemist-emperor Rudolf II. of Hapsburg. Rudolf, too,
could not decipher it. Whether this "Dr. Raphael", who
threw Voynich off the scent to Bacon, has ever existed,
is uncertain. Among the well-known Austrian advisors
of Ferdinand who became King of Bohemia in 1617, and
who as a Styrian in fact did not speak Bohemian, was a
Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnišovsky de Subuzin and de Horstein
5
(according to Roitzsch). According to Réne Zandbergen
6 , however, he died already in 1644. Should Marci, there-
fore, at the age of 71, remember exactly one event that
took place, at least, 22 years ago? Zandbergen proves
Raphael as a adviser and linguist of the Styrian Arch-
duke and later Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand III. (1608-
1657). The poet-jurist Sobiehrd-Mnišovsky, according to
Zandbergen, was "strongly interested in alchemy and in
secret writing."He was thus ideally suited to be used as
a proof for the assertion, that the mysterious book had Michal Habdank-Wojnicz in the 1920s.
already been owned by the alchemist-emperor Rudolf Photographer: Unknown. Source: Zandbergen

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EXPOTIME!, issue August/September 2017