Why the Voynich Zodiac - isn't

[VViews]

On this subject, since the VMS Leo is maneless and has a texture that MIGHT suggest very light spots, I looked around at leopard images and found a couple in old manuscripts that were labeled leon pard and leon pardo, which led me to wonder whether northerners who had never seen a lion might assume, from the names, that a leopard was a kind of lion (a spotted one). I looked up the etymology for pard/pardus and found it is descended from words for panther and tiger.

I'm not assuming the VMS illustrator was a northerner (if the leaf is an elephant head it's a pretty accurate one and the Taurus image is more antelope-like than bull-like) but given the inaccuracy of the animals in many of the bestiaries and that some of them appear to be drawn according to what the name suggests, it may be that some thought a lion and lion-panther were more similar than they are.

JKP,
the issue of the lion and the leopard goes quite far. There is a wonderful article by famous medieval art specialist Michel Pastoureau (in French, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) in which he explains in detail the medieval european perceptions of lions, leopards, eagles and bears.

TLDR version: The long, sad decline of the bear as king of the animals coincides with the rise of the eagle and leopard, between the 11th and the 13thC.
Interestingly at this time, there really was no distinction between a lion and a leopard: the only difference in representation was that a lion's head was shown in profile and a leopard's head facing the viewer. Thus, Richard Lionheart's arms were three leopards, and described as such in texts until the mid 14thC.
In the 14thC, the leopard fell out of fashion again, and the Lion became the king of the animals. Pastoureau describes the political reasons that led to the resurgence of Isidore's old opposiiton between the good lion and the evil leopard. In short, the French demonized the leopard as a way to undermine the English rulers. The popular spread of the image of the leopard as evil meant that the English kings eventually gave up the leopard for the more "noble" Lion. In practice, no changes were made: heraldic emblems remained unchanged, only the texts now said "lion passant guardant" instead of leopard (see article, p. 136).

Personal opinion: based on the above, I don't really see much point in trying to decide if the Voynich image is a leopard or a lion, considering that there was not much visual difference between the two for a while. It could be drawn as one but described as the other. So having Leo as a leopard should not be particularly shocking.