What Secret Lies within Bessler's Portraits?

This is an interim blog which I decided to write concerning recent speculation about the Bessler portraits.

There has been much discussion about the two portraits of Johann Bessler.  Do they contain hidden information and what that information might tell us?

In extracting meaning from Bessler's portraits it can sometimes be helpful to try and put yourself in his shoes.  What information was he trying to convey?

Personally, I don't see how he could transmit sufficient information about how to reconstruct his wheel from anything he contrived to hide in his portrait or portraits, so what do all the apparent clues mean? I am expressing my personal opinion here and I have published what I have been able to discover about the portraits at
http://www.theorffyreuscode.com/html/bessler_s_portrait.html.and here http://www.theorffyreuscode.com/html/part_2_portrait.html and
also here http://www.theorffyreuscode.com/html/2nd_portrait.html

The only facts that we can reliably extract are the quirky finger gesture which seems to point at some hidden meaning and the odd writing below the portrait which contains some alphanumeric clues and some curious font variables, plus the objects within the portraits, some indicating memento mori, and of course there is the pentagon, but all of these details seem to lead us to a dead end.  These vague hints seem to point to some secret knowledge relating to the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits or some other secret organisation.  They are definitely clues, but with this sketchy information it seems impossible to understand what he is trying to say. 

Approaching the puzzle from a different angle, I think that if Bessler wished to give us the information it, had to be in the form of detailed construction information in a separate place elsewhere, and maybe he designed the portraits to tell us where to look.

So where would we be likely to find the information that Bessler might be trying to point us to?Obviously the most important source would be drawings because a picture is worth a thousand words, but if its textual clues you want then you won't find a better place than his Apologia Poetica.  I have described some of my findings in my web site at 

http://www.theorffyreuscode.com/html/aps_chapter_55.html 

So somewhere in the design of the portraits lies a series of clues which may lead us to the source of the real secret - how to build a Bessler wheel..

JC

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