Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

I've seen many of them. I found these in less than five minutes, which means there are many more:

BNF Français 13096 c. 1313 sun and moon with faces
Fraz Ms 287 c. 1390 to c. 1400 sun and moon with faces
Hildegard von Bingen, sun and moon with faces
Lauber Studio mid-1400s sun and moon with faces
LJS 449 c. 1446, sun and moon with faces
Manzor A384, sun and moon with faces
De Sphaera, sun and moon with faces

I believe my own eyes long before I believe what people write in Wikipedia. Anyone can write or edit a Wiki article and sometimes they don't know what they are talking about.

Thanks JP. I was confident that you would find the exceptions to the rule. Wikipedia says "very uncommon", not "non-existent". As usual, you support your Made-in-Europe theory with recourse to the exceptions and rarely say something like "drawings like these VMS drawings were commonplace in Italy during the early 15th century". Indeed, it's unclear if any of your examples fall into that place and time.

Hildegard, I believe, lived in the 12th century and thus wouldn't be relevant here. So far, I only see a face emitting light which perhaps should not be taken as the Sun.

De Sphaera has Sun and Moon faces that resemble those seen in the VMS, but this work, from the early 13th century, predates the Cathar exodus. Moreover, Wikipedia says it derives from translations of Arabic works and that those translations were made in Toledo, a place to which I previously referred in this forum. Wikipedia adds that De Sphaera was a popular work so I imagine it may have influenced a few of the other face depictions.

Did the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans put human faces on their depictions of the Sun and Moon or did this custom begin with the Arabs?

I was wondering if you think Arabic could be the underlying language, or one of the underlying languages, of the VMS? I think so largely because two of my sources refer to translations from Arabic, and I also see a few instances of right to left reversals in the marginalia.

From what I can observe on Google images, European manuscripts of the high Middle Ages employed rulers or ruled lines to keep each line of text perfectly perpendicular to the edge of the page and equidistant from each other. Meanwhile, it looks like many Arabic manuscripts of that period were written freestyle, just like the VMS. How do you wish to explain that the VMS ignores hundreds of years of European custom on text layout?