25-02-2017, 12:13 AM
(This post was last modified: 25-02-2017, 12:49 AM by Diane.
Edit Reason: clarity
)
-JKP-
The constant efforts to represent this imagery as just a nice, ordinary European herbal that is putting on a funny but flimsy mask are a waste of time.
No-one with any competence in provenancing imagery is going to accept that vast discrepancy in stylistics as just a bit quirky. It's a substantial indication of different origins.
You look at all those examples produced as supposed comparisons and this is what stands out. The Latin herbal images are stiff, inaccurate efforts to make a single plant 'portrait'. The Vms images aren't stiff; we've known for more than half a century that they don't represent single plant 'portraits' and they sure as anything aren't inaccurate.
The argument about it being a nice, normal, Christian European herbal of that sort, just "seeming" strange is immediately disproven by the banana-group's being included, and pictured in a way that shows first-hand knowledge of that group AND of its uses beyond the Mediterrean. And history tells us - as the history of the herbals and Tacuinum imagery prove - that knowledge of these plants' actual appearance [not rough schematised images] remained unknown there for about two centuries after the Vms was made
The same is true for other plants, and even some from the Dioscoridan corpus. Well represented in Beinecke MS 408, though as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, westerners were still trying to find what the plant looked like.
The VMS isn't a nice, familiar, ordinary sort of Latin work whose presentation "seems" odd. It really is alien to that tradition. Obviously and blatantly. Style is not Latin save some of the late additions; script is not Latin European though the hand(s) could be; the language doesn't act like a Latin European work, and there's no way that a competent art appraiser would accept the comparison between the way the plant is pictured on f.25v and those presented above.
The problem is methodology. If the aim is to ascertain the origins and provenance of the imagery, then one has to first look carefully at the primary evidence, and seek close comparative examples.
If the aim is only to produce an impression that the work is, say, from north Africa, then the only examples shown will be from North African herbals... or German... or Syrian.. or whatever.
But the second is a methodology so flawed as a means for provenancing that such arguments can only survive within the 'Voynichero' environment; they wouldn't last ten minutes in the wider world of art history or even commercial appraisals.
Folio 25v, as has long been known, represents the Dracaena spp.
The particular plant shown to define the GROUP referenced here is (as we see from habitat, bark, and leaves) inot the Mediterranean plant which has been called (only for the past 150 yrs) D. draco. It is rather the Soqotran plant which has neither fruit nor flowers and which is now given the taxonomic description D.cinnabaris. It was known to the classical Mediterranean as 'Indian dragonsblood' and in fact both the modern descriptions are derived from the same passage from a classical Latin author.
Understanding imagery created from another time - requires a lot more work that most people imagine: opinions have to concur with the wider corpus of historical, literary, scientific and linguistic materials. Otherwise it's just a game of 'Go fish lite'.
This is what the image-maker had in mind. The broad, soft looking leaves which are also characteristic of early growth in D.cinnabaris. Minim was obtained from Dracaenas other than D.draco and D.cinnabaris, and another group (the variegated type) is imo pictured on f.3r. I've posited that 3r's base type is the plant known as D.javaensis, but colleagues have argued that Dracaena Marginata, the Madagascan dragontree is more likely, given the historical records of trade in 'dragonsblood' resin to the Mediterranean.
![[Image: dracaena_classification_164.jpg]](http://tipsplants.com/sites/default/files/img/articles/big/dracaena_classification_164.jpg)
The constant efforts to represent this imagery as just a nice, ordinary European herbal that is putting on a funny but flimsy mask are a waste of time.
No-one with any competence in provenancing imagery is going to accept that vast discrepancy in stylistics as just a bit quirky. It's a substantial indication of different origins.
You look at all those examples produced as supposed comparisons and this is what stands out. The Latin herbal images are stiff, inaccurate efforts to make a single plant 'portrait'. The Vms images aren't stiff; we've known for more than half a century that they don't represent single plant 'portraits' and they sure as anything aren't inaccurate.
The argument about it being a nice, normal, Christian European herbal of that sort, just "seeming" strange is immediately disproven by the banana-group's being included, and pictured in a way that shows first-hand knowledge of that group AND of its uses beyond the Mediterrean. And history tells us - as the history of the herbals and Tacuinum imagery prove - that knowledge of these plants' actual appearance [not rough schematised images] remained unknown there for about two centuries after the Vms was made
The same is true for other plants, and even some from the Dioscoridan corpus. Well represented in Beinecke MS 408, though as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, westerners were still trying to find what the plant looked like.
The VMS isn't a nice, familiar, ordinary sort of Latin work whose presentation "seems" odd. It really is alien to that tradition. Obviously and blatantly. Style is not Latin save some of the late additions; script is not Latin European though the hand(s) could be; the language doesn't act like a Latin European work, and there's no way that a competent art appraiser would accept the comparison between the way the plant is pictured on f.25v and those presented above.
The problem is methodology. If the aim is to ascertain the origins and provenance of the imagery, then one has to first look carefully at the primary evidence, and seek close comparative examples.
If the aim is only to produce an impression that the work is, say, from north Africa, then the only examples shown will be from North African herbals... or German... or Syrian.. or whatever.
But the second is a methodology so flawed as a means for provenancing that such arguments can only survive within the 'Voynichero' environment; they wouldn't last ten minutes in the wider world of art history or even commercial appraisals.
Folio 25v, as has long been known, represents the Dracaena spp.
The particular plant shown to define the GROUP referenced here is (as we see from habitat, bark, and leaves) inot the Mediterranean plant which has been called (only for the past 150 yrs) D. draco. It is rather the Soqotran plant which has neither fruit nor flowers and which is now given the taxonomic description D.cinnabaris. It was known to the classical Mediterranean as 'Indian dragonsblood' and in fact both the modern descriptions are derived from the same passage from a classical Latin author.
Understanding imagery created from another time - requires a lot more work that most people imagine: opinions have to concur with the wider corpus of historical, literary, scientific and linguistic materials. Otherwise it's just a game of 'Go fish lite'.
This is what the image-maker had in mind. The broad, soft looking leaves which are also characteristic of early growth in D.cinnabaris. Minim was obtained from Dracaenas other than D.draco and D.cinnabaris, and another group (the variegated type) is imo pictured on f.3r. I've posited that 3r's base type is the plant known as D.javaensis, but colleagues have argued that Dracaena Marginata, the Madagascan dragontree is more likely, given the historical records of trade in 'dragonsblood' resin to the Mediterranean.