11-01-2017, 03:48 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-01-2017, 03:58 AM by Diane.
Edit Reason: add
)
Anton,
As ever, I would ask people hoping to identify the subject of these drawings to consider critically the set of their reflexive assumptions.
The most prevalent assumption runs counter to both the evidence of the primary document and the science of iconographic analysis, or the business of assessing and correctly attributing an image - that flawed assumption could be expressed as "style of drawing doesn't matter".
In fact style of drawing is absolutely critical because it directs attention to the mind-set informing the image, and thus assists correct attribution. Style is how we distinguish whether the picture of (say) a woman and child is meant for the Madonna, and further whether it is a product of Italy, France, Spain, Russia, Egypt or China.
Since many also assume, without pausing to consider whether the assumption is anachronistic, that any divergence in style between Latin art and the imagery in Beinecke MS 408 may be dismissed as due to some imaginary figure called "the artist", we have the compounding of these two notions at work before the person even begins to posit a plant id.
Another unthinking assumption is that any pictures of plants must constitute a herbal. For all anyone knows, the pictures may be patterns for ... a craftsman's collection of patterns to be used in metalwork, tapestry, embroidery, silk fabric, mosaic, china-painting or woodwork.
So what if the 'herbal' idea is another assumption not just unexamined but plain wrong?
On top of all these - a card-house of one bit of guess-work on another - there is just one dominant tradition at work in European plant pictures in herbal manuscripts made between c.12thC and the time the manuscript was made - the Dioscoridan.
Now, we know that one of the remarkable innovations made by Dioscorides was to produce a single 'plant portrait' and thus in the Dioscoridan tradition - in the Islamic, Byzantine or the Latin corpus - every picture shows just one plant and tries with greater or lesser determination to make that 'portrait' realistic.
So the assumption of those who presume that this, too, may be presumed in treating the Voynich botanical pictures, begin with a triple-decker of unexamined and fairly obviously mistaken expectations - yet all they have already set limits to their efforts which account neither for style, nor for the method of construction for these images, nor taking into account particular customs found across this section of the manuscript.
So what we get are statements which, if expressed fully, would be "If the manuscript were entirely a product of Latin Europe, and if these botanical images were part of the Dioscoridan lineage, and if all the plants were ones appropriate to the medieval European range of knowledge.. then I guess the id would be thus-or-so.
But we know - in fact it was already known when Tiltman wrote about the Friedman group's unsuccessful efforts - that the botanical imagery as a whole does not employ the style of construction ('the plant portrait'), nor the style of presentation that the Dioscoridan tradition does. Thus, the grounds for supposing that the Vms botanical imagery *must* refer to plants known to medieval Latins is shaky indeed. And the Anicia Juliana ms did not arrive in Europe until after Beinecke MS 408 was made. But if the style is not appropriate, the principles of construction are not appropriate, and the plant-pictures are not "single plant portraits" either (another point well known sixty years ago), then these attempts are surely unlikely to prove accurate.
First one has to find when, and where, a similar style of drawing occurs; then an intellectual attitude which can explain the system of construction, and finally to find a coherent explanation and comparative historical examples for the curious little motifs - such as that I've called the 'circumscription mark'.
I suppose that the point I'm trying to make is that these pictures are made images - not 'failed photos' - and they need to be approached first as pictures and assigned their proper place and culture-of-origin. This is the always the very first step in treating a made picture. Only when that is done can one know whether or not the posited "id" is consistent with that time and place, and the range of information and plants which were certainly known.
Remember, in Baresch's time, German botanists and herbalists were the most eminent in Europe - meaning they had studied the range of older 'Dioscoridan' works as well as the contemporary science - and they couldn't identify any, apparently.
As ever, I would ask people hoping to identify the subject of these drawings to consider critically the set of their reflexive assumptions.
The most prevalent assumption runs counter to both the evidence of the primary document and the science of iconographic analysis, or the business of assessing and correctly attributing an image - that flawed assumption could be expressed as "style of drawing doesn't matter".
In fact style of drawing is absolutely critical because it directs attention to the mind-set informing the image, and thus assists correct attribution. Style is how we distinguish whether the picture of (say) a woman and child is meant for the Madonna, and further whether it is a product of Italy, France, Spain, Russia, Egypt or China.
Since many also assume, without pausing to consider whether the assumption is anachronistic, that any divergence in style between Latin art and the imagery in Beinecke MS 408 may be dismissed as due to some imaginary figure called "the artist", we have the compounding of these two notions at work before the person even begins to posit a plant id.
Another unthinking assumption is that any pictures of plants must constitute a herbal. For all anyone knows, the pictures may be patterns for ... a craftsman's collection of patterns to be used in metalwork, tapestry, embroidery, silk fabric, mosaic, china-painting or woodwork.
So what if the 'herbal' idea is another assumption not just unexamined but plain wrong?
On top of all these - a card-house of one bit of guess-work on another - there is just one dominant tradition at work in European plant pictures in herbal manuscripts made between c.12thC and the time the manuscript was made - the Dioscoridan.
Now, we know that one of the remarkable innovations made by Dioscorides was to produce a single 'plant portrait' and thus in the Dioscoridan tradition - in the Islamic, Byzantine or the Latin corpus - every picture shows just one plant and tries with greater or lesser determination to make that 'portrait' realistic.
So the assumption of those who presume that this, too, may be presumed in treating the Voynich botanical pictures, begin with a triple-decker of unexamined and fairly obviously mistaken expectations - yet all they have already set limits to their efforts which account neither for style, nor for the method of construction for these images, nor taking into account particular customs found across this section of the manuscript.
So what we get are statements which, if expressed fully, would be "If the manuscript were entirely a product of Latin Europe, and if these botanical images were part of the Dioscoridan lineage, and if all the plants were ones appropriate to the medieval European range of knowledge.. then I guess the id would be thus-or-so.
But we know - in fact it was already known when Tiltman wrote about the Friedman group's unsuccessful efforts - that the botanical imagery as a whole does not employ the style of construction ('the plant portrait'), nor the style of presentation that the Dioscoridan tradition does. Thus, the grounds for supposing that the Vms botanical imagery *must* refer to plants known to medieval Latins is shaky indeed. And the Anicia Juliana ms did not arrive in Europe until after Beinecke MS 408 was made. But if the style is not appropriate, the principles of construction are not appropriate, and the plant-pictures are not "single plant portraits" either (another point well known sixty years ago), then these attempts are surely unlikely to prove accurate.
First one has to find when, and where, a similar style of drawing occurs; then an intellectual attitude which can explain the system of construction, and finally to find a coherent explanation and comparative historical examples for the curious little motifs - such as that I've called the 'circumscription mark'.
I suppose that the point I'm trying to make is that these pictures are made images - not 'failed photos' - and they need to be approached first as pictures and assigned their proper place and culture-of-origin. This is the always the very first step in treating a made picture. Only when that is done can one know whether or not the posited "id" is consistent with that time and place, and the range of information and plants which were certainly known.
Remember, in Baresch's time, German botanists and herbalists were the most eminent in Europe - meaning they had studied the range of older 'Dioscoridan' works as well as the contemporary science - and they couldn't identify any, apparently.