Favorite Plant Tournament GROUP D

[Koen G]

Time to vote for the fourth group! There are so many plants in this manuscript.

1. 10v
   
2. 14r
   
3. 16v
   
4. 22v
   
5. 26r
   
6. 39v
   
7. 51r
   
8. 95v2
   

   

This is a strong batch, but with a clear winner for me.

[MarcoP]

For once, it seems I voted for a likely winner...

[ReneZ]

I didn't go for visually pleasing but for intriguing.

[ReneZ]

I'm getting worried that the single best plant drawing in the MS is going to be skipped.
But not many would vote for it anyway :-)

I'll wait patiently.

[Koen G]

I'm getting worried that the single best plant drawing in the MS is going to be skipped.
But not many would vote for it anyway :-)

I'll wait patiently.

I'm doing only large plants (Herbal section). Those are a lot to get through already. Is your single best plant one of the small ones?

[ReneZ]

No, it's one of the large plants, in the somewhat earlier part, but no problem... :-)

[Bluetoes101]

If it isn't You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I'm going to be upset.

[Koen G]

I should add that the brackets are made by arranging all plants in a random order through an inbuilt function of Google Sheets. This resulted in 16 groups of 8 plants. One remaining plant was added to group A.

[ReneZ]

Just to add some background, I have long (!) suspected that the drawings are based on written descriptions of plants. This would explain the composite nature. However, that suspicion did not find any resonance especially with the few experts in medieval herbals I know.

Then later Marco showed here in the Ninja forum that such things demonstrably exist, e.g. in the Tractatus de Herbis illustration of the banana plant.

Anyway, one good example of this is Nr.4, my favourite, in this group.
Plants have thorns, but not on their roots. A written description could easily be misunderstood.
I remember that Tiltman had some examples of that too.

So, maybe not a winner in the poll, but still a plant that may play a role in the understanding of the MS.

[Koen G]

That's a good (and encouraging) hypothesis. However, I don't think the roots are the best level to argue this case. There's a lot going on in the roots of the plants specifically, including many things that cannot be attributed to a misunderstanding of a physical description of the plant. How do you get two bulb-faces on horizontal bars in there? Two mammals conjoined at the head, with intertwining genitals? I'd rather suspect that this is a case of conscious creativity. Of course, this could still be based on a written description, and I agree this may be a major avenue of attack.