20-10-2018, 03:18 AM
Moderators are welcome to shift this thread to another part of the forum. I'm not sure where it should go.
Kunisada Utagawa Kuniyoshi has recently begun a series of blog-posts about toads, frogs and magic in Eastern Asia - mainly Japan.
I mention it to show two things
1. Why I do not think the Voynich botanical pictures or 'leaf and root' sections done by, or from, Japanese sources
and
2. Why a number of iconographic elements in the Vms are demonstrably inherited from the more generally Asian traditions in art.
The linked blogpost contains several, including
* the type of wave-pattern used to represent ocean, and employed both technically (in maps and charts) and as a decorative element in Asian art and textiles.
* the cloud-band pattern which passes (via a geometrical version used in Islamic art) into the west.
* you will also see on the shoulders of a Samurai figure the sort of pattern used to signify laminae, whether of metal or lacquer.
NB. The examples used in the blog-post date to the 19thC, but use of these customs in Asian art may be traced (as in fact I traced them) to long before the 15thC AD. The history of ideas about frogs and toads I have not treated online, feeling that the only relevant fact was that the amphibian in the Vms was demonstably one associated with the same plant with which it appears in the Vms.
Cheers.
Kunisada Utagawa Kuniyoshi has recently begun a series of blog-posts about toads, frogs and magic in Eastern Asia - mainly Japan.
I mention it to show two things
1. Why I do not think the Voynich botanical pictures or 'leaf and root' sections done by, or from, Japanese sources
and
2. Why a number of iconographic elements in the Vms are demonstrably inherited from the more generally Asian traditions in art.
The linked blogpost contains several, including
* the type of wave-pattern used to represent ocean, and employed both technically (in maps and charts) and as a decorative element in Asian art and textiles.
* the cloud-band pattern which passes (via a geometrical version used in Islamic art) into the west.
* you will also see on the shoulders of a Samurai figure the sort of pattern used to signify laminae, whether of metal or lacquer.
NB. The examples used in the blog-post date to the 19thC, but use of these customs in Asian art may be traced (as in fact I traced them) to long before the 15thC AD. The history of ideas about frogs and toads I have not treated online, feeling that the only relevant fact was that the amphibian in the Vms was demonstably one associated with the same plant with which it appears in the Vms.
Cheers.