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[Koen G]

In the myth of Procne and Philomela, Philomela's capture is the prologue to Procne's revenge. If you can't substantiate those events, how is the VMs illustration anything beyond generic - other than a clearly predisposed preference for finding something with classical Greek / Roman connections?

I may not have made clear enough which position I'm defending. I don't want to defend that this is a complete and detailed representation of all important parts of the story, because it is not, and it clearly isn't it intention.

Know that I came upon the story of Philomela rather late in my line of investigation. The "spindle-as-attribute" did lead me to believe that this was a mythological reference, but I looked into several, including a possible "Eve as spinner" iconography. I also checked the date range and summaries of other medieval tales, as well as classical myths. None of them seemed like a suitable match for what I hypothesized to be a number of scenes. When I got to know the story of Philomela, it was quite the revelation.

You need to have gone through a number of failed attempts to appreciate how close a match this is.

The position I want to defend concerning this imagery, is that it was likely drawn as a tool to help memorize other information. Linking the unknown information to well-known information is an excellent way to do this. Let me clarify with a modern example.

Say you need to study for a history test about the Cold War. You know nothing about it, and find it hard to remember. You are, however, a huge Lord of the Rings fan. You decide to come up with scenes from LotR that rougly match Cold War episodes - It's not that hard, because in each narrative you have a West vs. East story, a lasting impact on the world after the conflict, government issues... LotR is not about the Cold War since it was written before it, but that doesn't matter one bit - you use and abuse the story for your own needs. 

So you assign roles to each character and start doodling. It's not art class, so you represent the characters as stick figures with a clear attribute. For example Frodo gets a ring, even in scenes where he isn't wearing the Ring. Gimli gets an axe, also when he's not in combat. You find a few scenes that will help you memorize the key points of the cold war, and draw them like a comic using LotR characters in an "allegorical" way.

Does it matter if you give Frodo red pants instead of purple ones? No!
Does it matter if a number of key scenes aren't included? No! You are not telling the entire LotR trilogy - that wouldn't help you one bit.

And so on. Only in the VM, this seems to have been done in a much more skilled way than I ever could, and using a story that, as others have pointed out, was still popular in the Middle Ages as well. The author must have had a pretty clear image of his relatively limited audience and their knowledge (perhaps it was just for himself) - so he could select those stories that were known to them, even if those stories weren't popularly known by everyone.

The challenge will now be to uncover the type of information that is linked to these scenes from Ovid. It's almost certainly in the labels, as those don't match the characters - which perfectly fits my views. Let's also not forget that there is an entire page of text accompanying this image, possibly clarifying how it can be used as a mnemonic aid.