What I've noticed about the handful that look naturalistic is that they don't look like 15th century drawings. After comparing thousands of drawings, they are more similar to ones in the mid-16th century.
So, for a long time I pondered whether it was a 16th-century manuscript (or a 16th-century fraud manuscript) but I don't think so, the other indicators don't seem to fit.
So then I looked carefully at the drawings that were closer to those in the VMS (the more real ones) and what they had in common (with each other) was that more attention was being paid to naturalistic drawings taken from real plants, rather than following all the traditional (not-so-real) ways of doing it. I think the person who drew the plants knew something about plants, observed plants more carefully than people of the time and after thinking about this for a lot of years, this seems to me the more likely explanation of why the more real drawings of VMS plants resemble those from a few decades later. If you're copying from a plant (or dried specimen), the result is different than if you are copying from a traditional manuscript.
The trend was already there. The original Greek manuscripts had quite good drawings (e.g., Juliana Anicia), but then the "dark ages" set in plant-manuscript-wise, and a lot of strange things happened over the next few centuries, probably because many were copied by medical students rather than botanists and artists, and the drawings got pretty bad, but toward the end of the 14th century, there is improvement, and by the 16th century, they were taking a more botanical approach. The VMS is not out-of-place in that sense if one is willing to accept that looking at plants rather than older manuscripts was a bit ahead of its time.
So, for a long time I pondered whether it was a 16th-century manuscript (or a 16th-century fraud manuscript) but I don't think so, the other indicators don't seem to fit.
So then I looked carefully at the drawings that were closer to those in the VMS (the more real ones) and what they had in common (with each other) was that more attention was being paid to naturalistic drawings taken from real plants, rather than following all the traditional (not-so-real) ways of doing it. I think the person who drew the plants knew something about plants, observed plants more carefully than people of the time and after thinking about this for a lot of years, this seems to me the more likely explanation of why the more real drawings of VMS plants resemble those from a few decades later. If you're copying from a plant (or dried specimen), the result is different than if you are copying from a traditional manuscript.
The trend was already there. The original Greek manuscripts had quite good drawings (e.g., Juliana Anicia), but then the "dark ages" set in plant-manuscript-wise, and a lot of strange things happened over the next few centuries, probably because many were copied by medical students rather than botanists and artists, and the drawings got pretty bad, but toward the end of the 14th century, there is improvement, and by the 16th century, they were taking a more botanical approach. The VMS is not out-of-place in that sense if one is willing to accept that looking at plants rather than older manuscripts was a bit ahead of its time.