22-02-2021, 05:06 PM
I corresponded with Diane O'Donovan about this once, since iconography is her area of research. Diane's solution to the "weird plant problem" is more or less in line with JKP's: Real plants deliberately drawn with non-realistic or exaggerated features, in order to illustrate, and call to memory, what's distinctive and useful about this particular plant. I think this idea is compatible with Marco and René's idea about plants drawn from a written description, by an artist who had neither a live specimen, nor a highly accurate image of one, to use as a model.
Assuming the section we call "Herbal A" really is about plants (rather than just seeming to be about plants), then it's likely that the creators of the VMs did have some familiarity with the processed products of the plants they wished to write about. They probably had some interest in documenting some of the properties and practical uses of these plant derivatives. If I needed to draw a whole bunch of plants based on written descriptions, but had no idea what they looked like in the wild, and had only seen and used the things humans harvest from them, then an easy way to make one of my drawings look distinctive is to include features of its product(s) in my drawing.
With only minimal familiarity with medieval manuscripts in general, a question on my mind is, Why illustrate the plants in the first place? If a written description sufficed for the exemplar, why not for this work? This question is especially worth asking in light of Alain Touwaide's professional judgement that the VMs is not a typical medieval herbal, and quite possibly not an herbal at all. Someone better informed about books and literacy in the Middle Ages will have to correct me on this, but one idea I have, is that Herbal A was designed to be thumbed through like a reference book. A user of the reference could flip through quickly until he saw the image of the plant he was looking for. If the plants were drawn strictly according to sketchy verbal descriptions, I daresay a lot of them would end up looking too generic and similar to each other to serve this function well. A few fanciful distinguishing embellishments on each plant, based on things that are important to people about that plant, would solve this problem.
Diane also presented the idea that a given Herbal A page might be about a category of plant, or about a practical use for various plants, with the composite parts representing different plants that fall into that category, or all have that same practical use. Since this is not my idea, and she's not around to speak for herself anymore, I really can't say how precedented or likely this kind of imagery was in the middle ages.
Assuming the section we call "Herbal A" really is about plants (rather than just seeming to be about plants), then it's likely that the creators of the VMs did have some familiarity with the processed products of the plants they wished to write about. They probably had some interest in documenting some of the properties and practical uses of these plant derivatives. If I needed to draw a whole bunch of plants based on written descriptions, but had no idea what they looked like in the wild, and had only seen and used the things humans harvest from them, then an easy way to make one of my drawings look distinctive is to include features of its product(s) in my drawing.
With only minimal familiarity with medieval manuscripts in general, a question on my mind is, Why illustrate the plants in the first place? If a written description sufficed for the exemplar, why not for this work? This question is especially worth asking in light of Alain Touwaide's professional judgement that the VMs is not a typical medieval herbal, and quite possibly not an herbal at all. Someone better informed about books and literacy in the Middle Ages will have to correct me on this, but one idea I have, is that Herbal A was designed to be thumbed through like a reference book. A user of the reference could flip through quickly until he saw the image of the plant he was looking for. If the plants were drawn strictly according to sketchy verbal descriptions, I daresay a lot of them would end up looking too generic and similar to each other to serve this function well. A few fanciful distinguishing embellishments on each plant, based on things that are important to people about that plant, would solve this problem.
Diane also presented the idea that a given Herbal A page might be about a category of plant, or about a practical use for various plants, with the composite parts representing different plants that fall into that category, or all have that same practical use. Since this is not my idea, and she's not around to speak for herself anymore, I really can't say how precedented or likely this kind of imagery was in the middle ages.