Re: VMS -- Botany (f34v) Prunus

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dana,

>      It seems that the best we can do in comparing the VMS to other 
> documents is
> to find a unique exact match in only the VMS and another document and then 
> try to
> date the VMS (say + or - 50 years; we wouldn't know who copied whom) 
> around the
> item matched in the separate document, assuming that we can accurately 
> date that
> other document.

As you know, the standard approach to woodcuts is to place them side by 
side and examine their structural similarities:-
        http://www4.hmc.edu:8001/humanities/book/HUM2f2/illustrations.html

This is because many herbals of the period were heavily copied, widely 
circulated and intensively used - and then extensively pirated by derived 
works: but (I think) it's pretty clear the VMS show no signs of any of these.

So: I (for one) am not really expecting any flow of similarities out of the 
VMS, only into the VMS.

Do you believe that the botanical pictures in the VMS were done from life? 
And do you believe that the author - who doesn't show vast representational 
and drawing skills in the rest of the document -  devised the general 
stylistic idiom of the drawings himself/herself?

For me, I think they're copied: so the key point of finding their 
predecessor would be to link the VMS solidly into an external tradition 
and/or mode of representation and/or physical location and/or 
language/dialect - the author wouldn't have copied stuff unless he/she 
believed it.

Our dating/placing sandcastle is so far built on hairstyles and humanistic 
hands, and perhaps glazed barrels (the astrological pictures were likely 
borrowed from a calendar)... we need more than that, much more than that. :-(

Cheers, ....Nick Pelling....