ROS - does the bottom left echo the centre?

[Linda]

Yes exactly, the four corners idea has hit me before as well. And there is a coming together from these corners or quarters. I always took the central rosette to be analogous with Jerusalem in Mappa mundi traditions, which incorporates religion with geography, i think the same thing is happening here, but i think it also incorporates various other religious centers also. There is no one place where a subject of a particular religion is found, they were in all four corners as well, both impacted by the previous histories, and creating new histories simultaneously. So it is an updated center of the world, perhaps real, perhaps removed, hence the cloud band. The second double cloudband may represent the duality of the Greek and Roman versions of the polytheistic religions that existed before the monotheistic ones represented by Jerusalem et al. It also gives another indication of migration from one to the other over time. Or the central Rosette might be a real place, in that the central spot on the map of the Mediterranean would be Sicily.

What is funny is the Christian influence did not come from Jerusalem, but from Spain, the opposite end of the Mediterranean, which also had a mixed religious history. So the Jerusalem tradition gets left in the southeast corner and a new center of the ecumene emerges.