Heh you're right, I hadn't noticed that yet. I'd been pondering what the bottom of that root might mean, that's remarkable as well. No ideas though...
As you say it would be out of character to have the painter be completely responsible for the item. But it's the best option I've seem so far so we might add it in the "best guess" category.
arca, you picked a good one to mention ( f44r) because usually plant leaves of that length and shape don't point up like that (unless the plant has been flattened for drying, which is what I thought might have happened).
And that tadpole tail coming out of the leaves is not a normal structure for plants. Little "tails" like this sometimes occur on the upper part of the leaf, sometimes near the attachment point of the leaf to the stem, sometimes flapping over a berry as in Ruscus, but not normally with a round "head" and sitting on the outer edge of a leaf. Plant roots can be pretty complex and I thought it MIGHT be some kind of hollow chamber structure as are found on some plants, but you are right, it's also somewhat like a ladder. Mostly I have been assuming the oddities had some mnemonic function, but the last week has been a big eye-opener in terms of how we might look at things, and the whole composition, like some of the others, seems to go beyond that.
I think I'm about to revise my classifications for the VMS plants in the first time in over a decade. I used to think of them as naturalistic, stylized (possibly mnemonic), and fanciful and I was never quite sure of the purpose of the ones that looked fanciful to me.
I'm beginning to think they might be better thought of as "narrative". If I had considered that they might be telling a story, rather than simply being some more complicated level of mnemonic, I might have caught on to this line of thinking sooner. If Koen is right about the kinds of imagery that might be encoded into the plants, then I think "narrative" might apply to some of them. We could just say "symbolic" (and I have used that term on occasion) but that doesn't quite seem to get across the idea that these "parts" might be part of a larger story, so maybe the word narrative is more applicable.
(18-08-2019, 07:44 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I guess I found the nails?
f90v1
Root is a feline brandishing its claws. In Germanic languages, nail/nagel... can mean both fingernails and metal spikes.
There's potentially another layer of allusion here. Rev 5.5 describes Jesus as "the lion of the tribe of Judah" and "the root of David". The reference in Revelation (a New Testament book) is seen as an allusion to several verses in the Old Testament that Christians believe are prophecies concerning Jesus as the Messiah. There's a surprisingly(!) good summary on this Bible study website You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view..
In addition, that Rev 5:5 passage was incorporated into a medieval poem that seems to have existed since at least 890:
Ecce crucem domini / fugite partes adversae! / Vicit leo de tribu iuda / radix David.
Behold the cross of the Lord,
Flee hostile forces.
The lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered,
The root of David.
The poem is sometimes known as the Prayer of St Anthony of Padua, although it seems to predate his existence by quite some time. I have seen the poem used as part of a charm to stop a nosebleed in a manuscript of c. 1100–1140, but I have no idea how widely it was known or used in a medical context.
So if (and this is an enormous if, let's be honest) a number of guesses all turn out to be correct, then we have a lion root, which sprouts a cross shape made of nails - so maybe Jesus as the new testament fruit of the old testament root?
The Rev 5:5 verses in full:
Rev 5:5 (Vulgate version): Et unus de senioribus dicit mihi: "Ne fleveris; ecce vicit leo de tribu Iudae, radix David, aperire librum et septem signacula eius".
Rev 5:5 (NRSV): Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals."
Lions are ambiguous beasts. They can stand for courage and kingship, but also for violence and danger. Lions are killers.
The lion of Judah became a symbol of Israel, and lions are the most common animal in medieval Jewish art.
You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
So if we've got nails arranged like the Cross, and underneath a lion menacingly showing its claw, perhaps the allusion is to those of the tribe of Judah who (in the medieval mind) were the ones who put Jesus on the cross?
(20-08-2019, 11:38 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Lions are ambiguous beasts. They can stand for courage and kingship, but also for violence and danger. Lions are killers.
The lion of Judah became a symbol of Israel, and lions are the most common animal in medieval Jewish art.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
So if we've got nails arranged like the Cross, and underneath a lion menacingly showing its claw, perhaps the allusion is to those of the tribe of Judah who (in the medieval mind) were the ones who put Jesus on the cross?
The 'tribe of Judah' doesn't mean 'all of the Jewish people'. Jacob the grandson of Abraham supposedly had 12 sons, and each of those sons founded a tribe that became one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Both Jesus and the Old Testament King David were both descendants from the tribe of Judah. Being 'of the tribe of Judah' was actually a very positive thing and the gospel writers Matthew and Luke devote a considerable amount of space to tracing Jesus' lineage back to David and then Judah. The gospel of Matthew opens with that genealogy and it's where much of the 'tree of Jesse' imagery ultimately derives from.
In terms of the Rev 5:5 verse, Jesus is the lion of the tribe of Judah, so I don't think it would make sense to see the lion as 'menacing' in that interpretation.
Remember, the gospel writer Mark has the evangelist symbol of a lion, and St Jerome (a hugely important figure in medieval Europe) is nearly always depicted hanging out with a lion, so lions in Christian art are far more likely to refer to Jesus, Mark or Jerome, than to be a reference to Jewish people and/or Israel.
(20-08-2019, 10:59 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.arca, you picked a good one to mention ( f44r) because usually plant leaves of that length and shape don't point up like that (unless the plant has been flattened for drying, which is what I thought might have happened).
[... truncated for legibility...]
Heh, I was looking for the lion plant to write the post that followed the "is this a ladder?" post and all of a sudden I noticed the stem detail in 44r. I don't think my suggestion is anywhere near as strong as some of the other potential IDs, the thing-that's-possibly-a-ladder is faint and enclosed within the stem, but I thought it was worth pointing out as I hadn't seen it mentioned yet.
I didn't know that the 44r plant lacked a convincing ID. As you say (and have the database to back it up) there are a lot of unusual plant structures out there that occur naturally, but even so, some of the VMS plants contain features that don't seem to belong to the natural world. Everyone here will have seen countless medieval herbals where the plant illustrations have been augmented with animals and additional clues about the properties of the plant, so although embedding some sort of additional symbolic info within the plant seems to be an entirely new concept, the idea of herbal illustrations being more than just a botanical study is something that wasn't completely new to the medieval herbal genre.
I think Koen's arma christi idea is really valuable, even if it just forces everyone to look at the plants with fresh eyes. I find myself going backwards and forwards between being very sceptical and fully embracing the narrative layer, although at the moment I think I lean towards an interpretation that includes popular Christian symbolism more generally rather than just the arma christi. Reading everyone's thoughts is really making me think a lot about how I see the plants, especially because there's such a mixure of enthusiam and scepticism.
What I like about You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. is the arrangement of the text - it certainly looks as if there are two separate blocks of text there, one for the flower and another for the root.
(21-08-2019, 01:06 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I like about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the arrangement of the text - it certainly looks as if there are two separate blocks of text there, one for the flower and another for the root.
44r seems to be the crown of thorns plant, and the upper wording is very different from the bottom of the plant. The first 3 words mean "Blasphemy of these beautiful, the holy blessed one. I know it is the Semitic interpretation, but it does give the theory meritt. The counting of the flower petals, base, leaves dots, roots, and thorns. gives about the same meaning.
(09-08-2019, 08:46 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thanks, arca! Those are quite interesting.
Looking through Add MS 88929, I found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. quite revealing. I was suspecting those huge flowers with wide open tops referred to events in the sky. I thought You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. meant the eclipse, but this looks better, it's the wound held by angels in a cloudy frame. Ascension?
[... cut for forum tidyness ...]
In addition to the above, there's this beautiful little figurine that was sold by Sotheby's (a very fancy auction house in London) a few years ago. The figurine is Dutch, ~16.5cms tall, and dated to c. 1500–1525, but the shape of the cloud-band and the little rays attached to the figures are certainly reminiscent of a few flowers in the VMS. The Sotheby's page says that there's a similar item by the same artist/workshop in the Catherijneconvent museum, but I think the Catherijneconvent website is broken as it won't load at all for me. You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view..
[
attachment=3207]
That's a wonderful example, I've never seen anything quite like it. It really blurs the line between cloud mandorla shapes and those huge patterned VM flowers.