29-12-2020, 09:25 PM
Hi Mark. I did a bit of reading about Giovanni Fontana a couple of years ago. I'm not finding the source for this right offhand, so I'll have to dig for it, but the impression I got was that Fontana encrypted for the sake of encryption. His encrypted work was a demonstration of a technology, much like a prototype or a portfolio piece.
There have been a couple of recent threads about the VMs possibly having been a masterpiece or demonstration of a team of artisans' skills. And while I agree with the conclusions in that thread that this wasn't an artistic masterpiece, it could very well have been a cryptological one. The visual parallels Ellie Velinska drew between the VMs and Trithemius' cryptological masterpiece Steganographia made me take a long pause.
There have been a couple of recent threads about the VMs possibly having been a masterpiece or demonstration of a team of artisans' skills. And while I agree with the conclusions in that thread that this wasn't an artistic masterpiece, it could very well have been a cryptological one. The visual parallels Ellie Velinska drew between the VMs and Trithemius' cryptological masterpiece Steganographia made me take a long pause.