I did suggest on the forum a couple of months back that the VMS archer might be Robin Hood (yes, he was known in the 15th century and had several popular predecessors that were essentially the same persona with other names, some of which were fictional, others that may have been based on real people), but that didn't get a response.
What made me wonder if the archer might be inspired by a real person or popular fictional person was some research I did on old bells before I knew about the VMS. It turned out that a high proportion of them were based on people in popular culture at the time, but their origins were gradually being forgotten over the decades or centuries.
SOMETHING motivated the creators of the VMS subgroup of zodiacs to diverge from the Aratus tradition. A small proportion of illustrators, originally in the northeast France/Flanders area (this is my opinion, based on my research so far), substituted the affectionate couple and the two-legged man/satyr for the naked Castor and Pollux (both male) and the centaur Sagittarius. This subgroup spread east and south over a period of a couple of centuries and morphed slightly but is still recognizable as a specific minority zodiac series.
Why did they break with tradition?
After pondering this question for several years... it dawned on me that like the bells, some of the zodiac characters might also have been inspired by popular culture (characters in books, or played by mummers, etc.). Which led me to wonder if the couple might be Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde (which also go back a long time before Shakespeare under a variety of names), or some other famous couple, and from there I further wondered if the archer might be Robin Hood (or other popular archers through time since archery tournaments were popular and sometimes drawn in the margins of manuscripts).
What made me wonder if the archer might be inspired by a real person or popular fictional person was some research I did on old bells before I knew about the VMS. It turned out that a high proportion of them were based on people in popular culture at the time, but their origins were gradually being forgotten over the decades or centuries.
SOMETHING motivated the creators of the VMS subgroup of zodiacs to diverge from the Aratus tradition. A small proportion of illustrators, originally in the northeast France/Flanders area (this is my opinion, based on my research so far), substituted the affectionate couple and the two-legged man/satyr for the naked Castor and Pollux (both male) and the centaur Sagittarius. This subgroup spread east and south over a period of a couple of centuries and morphed slightly but is still recognizable as a specific minority zodiac series.
Why did they break with tradition?
After pondering this question for several years... it dawned on me that like the bells, some of the zodiac characters might also have been inspired by popular culture (characters in books, or played by mummers, etc.). Which led me to wonder if the couple might be Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde (which also go back a long time before Shakespeare under a variety of names), or some other famous couple, and from there I further wondered if the archer might be Robin Hood (or other popular archers through time since archery tournaments were popular and sometimes drawn in the margins of manuscripts).