Quote:Anton, I'm not sure where you found mention of Carthamus tinctorius in connection with folio 54r, and I'm not trying to do more than offer the fact when I say that such was my own identification. I published that quite some time ago and will send you a copy of it if you'd like to know the evidence and reasoning behind it.
To judge from the quality of silence which met my opinion, nothing of the sort had been said before, and if anyone else has repeated the id since, I've not had any ping-backs.
But the short story is - yes - you have at least one person to cite for that id.
Excellent! I must confess that, to my shame, due to the lack of time, I still haven't looked through your identifications that you sent me a while ago - I should add them to my blog post about the "focal set of plants". So I don't know whether carthamus is there or not. But it's good (and encouraging) that someone (i.e. you) have come to this identification through the imagery analysis. Because how I yesterday came to that was completely other way around. What I did was this:
1) Look at the VMS picture and see if any mnemonics manifest themselves to my eye;
2) Having marked out supposed mnemonics, propose objects that they look like. Basically, I thought of wolf's/fox's tails for the roots and leaves and of skirts for those elements of the stem. I also borrowed the feathers suggestion from the description on Rene's website;
3) Search Pritzel's index for mentions of those objects;
4) Look for the plants which names refer to those object's names and see if they match the VMS picture more or less fine.
Thus I found this Carthamus, only instead of tails or feathers one of its folk names referred to a brush - and I think that brushes may be exactly what the painter was trying to depict here.