21-08-2016, 01:40 AM
(This post was last modified: 21-08-2016, 01:55 AM by Diane.
Edit Reason: final par
)
Koen,
On the months' activities, and in connection with later activities in the Sicilian kingdom, early in the fourteenth century, I found the mosaic calendar of Otrano particularly interesting.
It is all beautifully illustrated at Paradox Place (use your search engine for Otranto AND mosaic and it should turn up. P.P. doesn't want to be hot-linked, and I respect that preference on their part.
The comment about the bestiaries is perfectly true, but the pairing of animals and of animal heads is common in earlier works - from which, of course, the bestiary tradition came - from North Africa, actually, while some of it was still under Byzantine rule.
The paired *beardless* goats which I used when explaining that the "Aries" weren't sheep, as they were always said to be before that was written, came from a mosaic in Antioch. I also referred to the bestiaries, and to Isidore's Etymologies (all its matter taken from classical sources and early patristic literature) to explain why the identification as goats [in the VMS distinguished as the "wild" and the "tame"] would have been as immediately evident to Latin speakers as to the original makers.
Need I say that none of this alters my conclusion that what we have in this section of the manuscript was plainly meant to relate to the series of months by the time the month-names' inscriptions were added, but that we do not have a series of zodiac figures, doubled or otherwise.
It's nice to see that so many of my observations are now becoming common currency - that Marco should be re-visiting the matter of 'doubling' isn't so surprising, either. I believe that Rene long ago referred to doubled zodiacs, as others probably also did before him - though the original research and who did it is not part of the current record.
On the months' activities, and in connection with later activities in the Sicilian kingdom, early in the fourteenth century, I found the mosaic calendar of Otrano particularly interesting.
It is all beautifully illustrated at Paradox Place (use your search engine for Otranto AND mosaic and it should turn up. P.P. doesn't want to be hot-linked, and I respect that preference on their part.
The comment about the bestiaries is perfectly true, but the pairing of animals and of animal heads is common in earlier works - from which, of course, the bestiary tradition came - from North Africa, actually, while some of it was still under Byzantine rule.
The paired *beardless* goats which I used when explaining that the "Aries" weren't sheep, as they were always said to be before that was written, came from a mosaic in Antioch. I also referred to the bestiaries, and to Isidore's Etymologies (all its matter taken from classical sources and early patristic literature) to explain why the identification as goats [in the VMS distinguished as the "wild" and the "tame"] would have been as immediately evident to Latin speakers as to the original makers.
Need I say that none of this alters my conclusion that what we have in this section of the manuscript was plainly meant to relate to the series of months by the time the month-names' inscriptions were added, but that we do not have a series of zodiac figures, doubled or otherwise.
It's nice to see that so many of my observations are now becoming common currency - that Marco should be re-visiting the matter of 'doubling' isn't so surprising, either. I believe that Rene long ago referred to doubled zodiacs, as others probably also did before him - though the original research and who did it is not part of the current record.
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