Qasr mosaic leopard and VMS Leo/August image

[Koen G]

It's interesting, considering that that manuscript also has a weird calendar cycle with doubling.

How common is it for Leo to have a tree in the background?  I wonder if both the VMS and that Pierpont Morgan M.511 could be related to some kind of unrecognized transmission of material from antiquity, accounting for both the unusual imagery and unusual calendrical ideas.

As you can see, I've been looking into this today. I also read the article recommended by Marco when he referred to these manuscripts: "Two Unusual Calendar Cycles of the Fourteenth Century", Olga Koseleff Gordon, 1963, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

In summary:

Olga Koseleff Gordon argues that many of the images in the calendar cycles were gained from different sources like bestiaries. There, copyists could find images of animals they did not know from their own area (i.e. lions, scorpions...). This is where the animal-and-tree motifs were found by the scribe. Other strange aspects she ascribes to a lack of familiarity of the scribe with current forms, and a lack of skill in general. 

I found this part of her conclusion very relevant: "As a whole the individual motifs of the occupations and of nine zodiac signs go back to patterns which, for the 1330's, are rather antiquated".

As Diane noted in the other thread, these bestiaries understandably relied on North African traditions, which is where the tree-related motifs, as well as the butting animals came from. To quote from one of her other comments: "The animal standing in front of the palm is a pre-Islamic motif from the eastern Mediterranean and in north Africa, before and after the Christian era. So what I think we have in the Voynich image is a Hellenistic-period original from one or other of those two, but ‘decayed’."

So taking all this into account, the composite image I posted strongly points towards a non-astronomical and non-European origin of the imagery. The manuscripts noted by Marco show another way such imagery reached Europe, though here the path of transmission is easier to read and the intentions of the scribe better understood.

Now in the Voynich there is one additional indication of its non-astronomical origin: it's not even a lion.