Lines interrupted by drawings

[-JKP-]

I don't know about the plant folios, bi3, but I think it would be extremely difficult for someone to draw the complex interrelationships that exist in the "map" folio unless they had sketched out (and planned) it carefully beforehand. It sometimes takes 2 or 3 tries for an image with so many textures and so much non-overlapping text-in-circles to work out right.

Whether this occurred with the plants, I don't know, it seems like it would be a lot of extra work and less likely, but the whole manuscript feels to me like it was carefully planned. So, perhaps the text was written out on a wax tablet first and then copied (or copied from another source, but it seems unlikely that the same plant-drawing shapes would have existed in an earlier manuscript).


Or, I guess a further possibility, if the text is generated from some prescribed method, is that the writer chose something shorter or longer to fit whatever the situation demanded.