The cross and the presence or lack of Christian influences

[-JKP-]

...but also the images are carefully composed with elements that are general enough for not hinting or giving anything about the manuscript contents nor it's meaning...

I think it's quite possible the manuscript was visually crafted to obscure its meaning. The only parts I have doubts about is the plant sections. The plants seem too numerous and too carefully drawn to be there simply as decoys. Whoever created them seems to have had a genuine interest in recording information about plants (at least visually).


But, it has occurred to me, as one example, that the star labels might not be star names as many people assume—that the stars might not be stars at all. Maybe they are cities. If you change the star shapes to dots or castles and consider sun and moon to stand for directions (or to be decorative), then they look like some of the maps from the middle ages.

There were specific places in Italy were scribes were manufactured in the 15th century: Monastic Scribes and Libraries and universities.
Let us concentrate on the Northern Italy region (now Italy & Switzerland & Austria). Find out where those were located.
Find specific scribes and compare the Sun and Moon diagrams. 

I've looked into this pretty extensively, and have collected names of scribes (or studios, since the individual scribes were not always known). There were many scribes in Lombardy and the parts of northern Italy that bordered southern Lombardy (e.g., Milan, which was on the border between Lombardy and the Italian states at the time, Padua and Florence). Also Paris and parts of Flanders (in fact Flemish & Normandy-area illustrators were often contracted to illustrate the work of Parisian scribes). Also Nuremburg, Swabia/Tirol and parts of the Alsace (esp. St. Gall) up to Augsburg, and London and Bury St. Edmunds. I've mentioned the Lauber studio a number of times and have posted examples of the similarity in palette and style to the VMS drawings.

These were the "hot spots" for manuscript production in the 15th and late 14th centuries. They were not the only ones, of course, but they were ones with significant influence and production volume. Many were monastic, but some were secular.


Many of the examplars these scribes used (especially for herbal manuscripts) came from the earlier Lombardic colonies, which were multicultural centers of learning that included Lombards, Jews, Muslims, and Christians (Bari/Naples/Salerno). Diverse scholars were attracted to the boot of Italy because of the medical schools and brought back manuscripts that seem to have especially ended up in Lombardy, the northern Italian border, London, St. Gall, and Paris (and to some extent in Trento and southern Bavaria).


But I'm not certain that whoever created the VMS was directly associated with these major centers. The handwriting is clearly not a highly-trained hand. It's tidy and careful, but it's not scribal quality. I still wonder whether it was a traveler, someone who had access to libraries but wasn't necessarily tied to one place. The influences seem more diverse than conventional manuscripts.