(17-11-2025, 07:47 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't quite know what to say to that. It's scribes, not copy machines. So we have two accidental resemblances, which both Bernd and I insist are not accidental, on the same folio?
You were looking for pairs of drawings that seemed to depict parts (roots, leaves, etc.) from the same plant species. What I am looking for is pairs of drawings that seem to have been copied from the same drawing.
Because, when scribes were not inventing things on their own, they were in fact just imperfect copying machines. They did not draw plants or anything, with ink on vellum, by looking at the actual things. That is what artists did, and they used pencil or charcoal on paper. Scribes copied from other books or manuscripts, or from drafts and sketches.
Thus, when the VMS scribes were not just inventing plant parts (which is the case, I believe, for almost all the flowers in the Herbal, like for all the nymphs in Bio and Zodiac) they were copying from other books, from sketches provided by the Author, or from drawings in another section of the VMS (most likely Herbal from Pharma than the other way around, I would say).
When copying a root or leaf, the scribe would inevitably make some changes -- for lack of attention, lack of skill, because he misunderstood the original, because he thought that some details were not important, or because he thought he could improve the drawing. For example:
f1v vs f102r2: the scribe who drew the former apparently though that the lobes of the root were stubby horizontal cylinders with flat ends, which are botanically very unlikely. At least one of the scribes misunderstood the shape and placement of the rootlets. At least one of them got the shape of base of the leaves slightly wrong.
f23r vs f102r2: At least one of the scribes, maybe both, failed to understand the 3D shape of the root, and drew an impossible jumble of cylinder sides and cross-sections. And the scribe of You are not allowed to view links.
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two plants connected by a branch, so he just duplicated the drawing of the root (same three cylinders and three cross-sections) leaving it ambiguous whether they were connected or just overlapping in projection.
f47v and f102r2: At least one of the scribes thought that the number of root branches was not important as long as their shapes and proportions were generally those we see, and the root had broad "shoulders" with "epaulets". So one of them drew five branches, while the other drew six. Most likely, neither of them planned the drawing; they just kept adding branches one after the other, until they filled the width of the "shoulders". We see this sort of (non)planning in practically every Cosmo or Zodiac diagram.
f39r vs f95r2: The scribe who drew f95r2 apparently had a better understanding of perspective than his colleague, because he understood that the rootlets in the background had to be spaced closer together than those in the foreground. Whereas, while the scribe of f39r understood that the background rootlets had to be shorter and thinner, he had them alternate with the foreground ones, hence with the same spacing. On the other hand, the f95r2 scribe exaggerated the width of the foreground rootlets. At least one of the two scribes, probably both, thought that the number of rootlets was not important, and just added enough to fill the perimeter of the "pancake". The two also had somewhat different understandings about how the leaves connected to the root. And the scribe of f95r2 apparently had to bend his "pancake" because he added to his plant a thicker main stem that probably was not in the original.
And now for
f48r vs f48v: while both roots have bulbs, and both have rootlets with similar shapes, the arrangement of those elements is quite different. If both were copied from the same source, or one from the other, I don't see how a scribe could have been so sloppy or cheeky to make such drastic changes to the original arrangement. It is like if he had to draw an apple but drew a banana instead.
Could it be that those two root drawings are now perceived as a match mainly because they (unlike most other roots in the VMS) were left unpainted? It seems that some of us still believe that the painting was contemporaneous with the drawings. Well, I don't...
All the best, --stolfi
