Well, the observation is correct, and I personally
think that these features are quite deliberate.
I also think, however, that assigning it to
Cartesian coordinates or a binary code is the
result of thinking like a 20th Century observer.
Projecting contemporary values and ideas onto the relatively blank canvas
of the VMS is a crime of which we here are all guilty (to a lesser or
greater degree) from time to time: but, for a change, I have a more subtle
point to make. :-)
I mentioned Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the Sienese school of painters in a
recent mail: AFAIK, their work contained the first well-known uses of
perspective in art in Europe - and roughly 50-100 years before the VMS'
date-band.
So my question is: when did people start to talk (and think) in terms of
three dimensions? And, then, what was the development of the concept of
3-space, especially during 1400-1500? And in what terms were three
dimensions described during that time?
It's entirely possible that the left-right/up-down/front-back dimensions we
observe in the nymphs' poses might help us date (or place) the VMS, purely
by reference to the historical development of 3-space as a socio-linguistic
construction.
But all that's a thing I know next to nothing about. :-( Are there any
historians of science here? :-)
And also: (IIRC) the realisation by historians that Francis Bacon described
a binary code pushed the dating of the earliest use of binary backwards by
a century (or was it two?) - but did he devise it entirely himself, or had
he seen (or heard of) precedents for it?
Rather than arriving on a divine thunderbolt or a Philip K Dick-ish pink
beam of light, most new ideas seem instead to emerge from a nebulous cloud
of half- or quarter-ideas at those points in history where they're
needed... so who knows? :-/