So azurite remains our prime suspect - unless it was some weird mulberry
juice!
Here's a project by Emma Sharp at King's College London, analysing the use
of Raman microscopy / spectroscopy and FTIR to determine the types of
pigment used on (amongst other things) a 15th century manuscript, with a
view to aiding sympathetic restoration etc:
May I ask: has anyone here put together (in the past) a proper research
proposal to the Beinecke for analysing these kinds of things?
They're definitely planning to do some conservation work on the VMS
sometime soon... but if they don't even know what it's made of, how could
they do a proper job?
I'm no Gil Grissom (:-9) but proper forensic analysis would almost
certainly teach us many things about the VMS that (for example)
palaeography and cryptography can't.