Voynich Comparator | Morgan M.721 La Sfera: When Cosmology Became Winds, Zones, Seas and Maps

A circle can become a world.

A ring can become climate.

A face blowing air can become a direction.

A page opening can become the Mediterranean.

Morgan MS M.721, a fifteenth-century Tuscan copy of La Sfera, is a compact lesson in how medieval cosmography crosses representation modes without changing subject.

The manuscript contains a rhymed Italian poem about the world, celestial spheres, the mariner’s compass, travel and geography. Its margins and page openings carry diagrams of the firmament, zones of the Earth, winds and maps reaching across the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean world.

The manuscript is probably Florentine and belongs to the second half of the fifteenth century.

It is later than the Voynich parchment window.

That makes it a mechanism control rather than a source candidate.

La Sfera shows how one medieval knowledge system can move seamlessly from circles to winds to zones to maps. The Voynich Rosettes should therefore be tested as an information architecture, not merely compared to one familiar picture.

Quick Read

Morgan MS M.721 was produced in Tuscany, probably Florence, in the second half of the fifteenth century.
It contains the Italian cosmographic poem La Sfera.
The work consists of 124 rhymed stanzas of eight lines each.
The Morgan describes the poem as astronomical-geographic, including information about the world, the mariner’s compass, travel and related observations.
The manuscript contains twenty coloured marginal illustrations of maps and celestial spheres.
Its diagrams include the firmament, Earth zones, the Sun, Moon, day and night, and wind systems.
Several maps extend across page openings and label seas, rivers, countries and cities.
Its information system therefore links cosmology, orientation, navigation and geography.
The manuscript was purchased from Wilfrid Voynich in 1927; that modern custody fact does not create any medieval relationship to Beinecke MS 408.
The comparator is especially useful for the Voynich Rosettes because it demonstrates how cosmographic systems can change visual mode while preserving relational coherence.

Comparator Firewall

Italian + cosmography + maps + later sale by Voynich ≠ Voynich Manuscript provenance. M.721 is a structural control for diagram grammar and representation switching.

The Same Knowledge System Changes Shape

Early in M.721, celestial and terrestrial information appears in circles.

Later, the manuscript presents maps.

Elsewhere, winds become personified faces.

Earth zones become labelled bands.

Day and night become a diagram involving the Sun, Moon and Earth.

This is not a random visual mixture.

The representations are chosen according to the relation being explained.

That is the first lesson for Voynich.

A coherent manuscript does not need one visual grammar. It can use several representational grammars inside one conceptual system.

The Zones of the Earth Are Circular Because the Model Is Global

M.721 includes diagrams dividing the Earth into climatic zones.

The Morgan record describes labels for cold, temperate and torrid zones and the equinoctial circle.

Directions such as east, north, south and west are integrated into the geometry.

The page is not depicting a landscape.

It is depicting relations on a world model.

This gives us a control for the Voynich circular cosmological pages.

When a circular structure appears, its job may be classificatory or coordinate-based rather than pictorial.

Winds Turn Direction Into Actors

M.721 represents winds as faces and labels directional sectors.

This is a useful reminder that personification can carry technical information.

A human or face-like figure in a medieval diagram is not automatically narrative.

It may represent a force, direction, quality or category.

The Voynich’s repeated human figures should therefore be tested for positional and relational functions before being interpreted as literal individuals.

Day and Night Become Geometry

One M.721 diagram shows the personified Sun, crescent Moon and Earth with day and night labelled.

The visible picture is simple.

The concept is relational.

Light falls one way.

Darkness occupies another region.

Earth’s position organises the distinction.

Again, the diagram behaves like a sentence made of spatial relations.

This is why Voynich circles should be encoded structurally before semantic labels are proposed.

Then the Manuscript Opens Into Maps

Later folios shift from abstract cosmography to geographic mapping.

The Morgan images show maps extending across page openings.

One opening maps Asia Minor and neighbouring regions.

Another carries the Mediterranean across the gutter.

Place names identify rivers, cities, seas, regions and islands.

The visual grammar changes from nested circles to geographic networks.

The knowledge system remains about orientation in the world.

This Is a Powerful Control for the Rosettes Foldout

The Voynich Rosettes foldout has repeatedly been interpreted as a map, cosmological diagram, city plan, pilgrimage landscape, technical schematic or symbolic world.

M.721 suggests a disciplined way forward.

First separate representation modes.

Which parts behave like cosmological rings?
Which parts behave like mapped regions?
Which connectors behave like routes?
Which labels attach to places rather than structures?
Which repeated motifs behave like orientation markers?
Does the whole system preserve a coordinate logic?

A hybrid map-cosmology is historically plausible.

But plausibility is not identification.

Page Openings Can Be Designed as One Surface

M.721 uses the gutter deliberately.

Maps extend across two facing pages.

This matters for Voynich production analysis because the codex opening can be the true design unit rather than the individual folio side.

A diagram interrupted by binding is not necessarily damaged conceptually.

The reader is expected to see the spread.

Voynich foldouts take this logic even further by expanding the visual field beyond the normal opening.

Travel Knowledge and Cosmology Share One Book

The Morgan catalogue explicitly characterises La Sfera as adding observations about travel and the mariner’s compass to its world description.

This is another useful anti-category control.

Cosmology can feed navigation.

Direction can feed travel.

Maps can operationalise the world model.

Therefore a technical cosmological manuscript can be both theoretical and practical.

The Voynich Rosettes should likewise be tested for action or navigation functions, not only symbolic meaning.

The Unfinished Illumination Is an Important Production Control

The Morgan notes that the illumination of M.721 is unfinished and that the map of Crimea on folio 24v was not completed.

This is useful for the Voynich Order-of-Making problem.

A manuscript can survive in an incomplete decorative state while its intellectual system remains understandable.

Therefore unfinished paint does not necessarily imply abandoned composition.

Production stages must be separated.

The Italian Origin Is Not Enough for Padua

M.721 is Tuscan, probably Florentine.

That makes it especially useful to the Padua hypothesis.

Many features that can feel “Italian” are distributed across regions:

vernacular technical writing;
cosmological circles;
winds;
maps;
travel knowledge;
celestial diagrams.

Therefore an Italian resemblance is only the beginning of localisation.

Padua requires regional features that distinguish it from Florence, Lombardy, Venice, Bologna and other manuscript centres.

The Modern Voynich Sale Must Again Be Quarantined

Like Morgan M.722, M.721 was purchased from Wilfrid Voynich in 1927.

This is a twentieth-century provenance fact.

It has no automatic bearing on fifteenth-century ancestry.

But the repeated appearance of Voynich as a dealer of technical medieval manuscripts is still historically interesting in the correct lane.

It belongs to the history of collecting and the modern comparison environment.

It does not belong in the medieval source graph without evidence.

What M.721 Can Legitimately Teach Voynich Research

One coherent cosmographic system can use circles, personifications, wind diagrams and maps.
Representation mode can change while conceptual function remains related.
Page openings can be designed as a single information surface.
Cosmography can connect directly to navigation and travel.
Personified faces can function as technical directional markers.
Incomplete illumination does not imply an incoherent manuscript.
Italian cosmographic features are not uniquely Paduan.
Modern dealer provenance must be kept separate from medieval production.

What It Does Not Prove

that the Rosettes foldout is a map;
that Voynich was produced in Florence;
that its circles represent terrestrial zones;
that its faces or figures represent winds;
that Voynich labels are place names;
that its foldouts are navigation tools;
that Wilfrid Voynich’s later sale of M.721 creates any medieval relationship.

The eduKate Multi-Representation Test

Encode M.721 content as concepts independent of visual form.
Map which concepts are represented by circles, figures, labels, maps or prose.
Measure how the same directional and geographic concepts recur across modes.
Build similar maps for other cosmographic manuscripts.
Identify generic late-medieval conventions.
Encode Voynich Rosettes and cosmological pages with the same neutral feature vocabulary.
Test whether multiple Voynich representation modes can be explained by one underlying relational system.
Require labels, directions and connectors to behave consistently under the proposed model.
Reject interpretations that work only by changing what the same visual relation means from one panel to another.

Student Lens: One Idea Can Need Several Kinds of Picture

Primary: show Earth as a globe, a weather map and a route map. They look different but refer to the same world.

Lower Secondary: identify which representation is best for direction, climate, distance or route.

Upper Secondary: separate invariant relationships from surface drawing style.

JC and adult readers: model a technical manuscript as a multi-representation system in which different visual grammars project different dimensions of one underlying knowledge graph.

Research Sources

Continue the Comparator Route

The Final Idea

La Sfera gives us circles.

Then winds.

Then zones.

Then seas.

Then cities.

Then routes across the known world.

It does not become five unrelated books when the visual grammar changes.

It changes representation because the question changes.

The Rosettes problem may become easier when we stop asking which single medieval picture it resembles and start asking whether its many visual modes are projections of one underlying system.