[Blog Post] An Allegory of Salvation (Koen Gheuens & Cary Rapaport)

[Koen G]

I completely agree, Marco, probably I expressed myself poorly. If one accepts that medical, or more generally "scientific" imagery has influenced the VM (which I do now), then it is almost impossible to argue that the content does not contain any foreign influences. And more generally, "foreign" is such a difficult term. For example I think several (imported) Byzantine manuscripts were probably used as a source. This would also count as "foreign" as opposed to a strictly central European setting, but still it is perfectly normal in 15th century Italy.

What I meant to say is that if one argues that the MS was actually made by [insert non-Christian-European culture of choice here], then we would expect to see the stylistic marks of its makers more clearly. For example, if someone claims the MS was made in America, okay, then are we talking pre-Hispanic culture, colonial era Spanish culture or some mixture of both? There are no stylistic indications for any of this. The same can be said about Jewish or Arab makers. 

But of course I agree that source material is a different question.