Compound plants in the VMS ?

[RenegadeHealer]

Wait so they drew on the whole cow skin before cutting it up into four bifolios? Why would they do that? It sounds much more practical to draw on simple bifolios.

 Fair point. My source for this assumption was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (translated from the Russian with Google Translate), which I read some time ago. I mistakenly thought Wladimir meant that most or all quires of the VMs were originaly conceived and constructed as uncut octavo sheets. I reread this blog post again today, and sure enough, he was talking only about Q13.

Indeed, if the finished product was intended to be a codex made of bifolios, then cutting the parchment into bifolios prior to marking them makes more sense. I have no grounds, therefore, for assuming that pages that weren't on the same bifolio were created close to each other in time or spatial layout, to say nothing of theme or intent.

In light of this, I'm still intrigued that f9v and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are both unusually identifiable and realistic, and share the same side of a bifoio. On the other hand, I'm now a lot less intrigued with f2v's positioning, though very much so with its verisimilitude.