Plans for conference?

[Koen G]

I wonder if the conference could really bring something new to the research on the manuscript.

It depends. There are probably a bunch of people with a private VM research project going on, this might encourage them to publish. I am not hoping for a grand solution, but rather little bits of evidence that might help us build a better understanding.


R.Sale: It is difficult. If it is the case that VM images are not literal, they need to be interpreted in a way. When interpretation issues arise in regular manuscripts, we can often refer to the text to understand what they were trying to communicate - but clearly we don't have that luxury in the VM. The most prominent art historian to have commented on the VM was probably Panofsky, and his assessment of the MS was easily swayed just because someone told him one of the flowers was a New World species. 

There is almost no foothold, and therefore it is difficult to rise above anything other than personal interpretation. So if someone (who is not a professional art historian) sends in something about the imagery, the peer reviewer would be tasked with assessing this person's interpretation. I suspect that in most cases, this should lead to a justified rejection.

One way around this is to focus on a small aspect and try to find its place in (art)-history. This allows you to ask a question and answer it through your research. Something like Marco Ponzi and Darren Worley did with features of the Zodiac figures. Or more recently what we did here by finding manuscripts that depict swallowtail merlons and mapping where they were produced. If you ask a question and present the way you found an answer, nobody can say that it is just your interpretation.