Qasr mosaic leopard and VMS Leo/August image

[Sam G]

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".

What I'm wondering though is if the doubling and the archaic imagery don't go together in some way, and perhaps the resemblance with bestiaries is only due to the fact that bestiaries have archaic imagery as well?

For instance, perhaps there's some kind of archaic North African zodiacal/calendrical system that did not survive anywhere in an intact form, but vestiges of it show up in strange places, such as in the VMS and in the two manuscripts described by Gordon.  Perhaps the creators of these two manuscripts knew about this material from some source, but only made use of it to add a bit of novelty to an otherwise conventional Western European zodiac sequence.  The same idea might also apply to some of the Islamic parallels noted with the VMS, such as the doubled Cancer or the Voynich-like Aries and Leo pointed out by Marco above.

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I did some looking through images from bestiaries and found a few potentially relevant images.

Here's a lion from North France, ca. 1250-1260:


The description reads:
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. 14429, Folio 109v
A sad lion. The odd spikey shape above its back does not appear to be its tail, though what it is meant to be is not clear.

Maybe another tree that wound up becoming reinterpreted as part of the lion?

Here's a "pair" of goats (which are actually from different copies of the same book, Der Naturen Bloeme by Jacob van Maerlant, the darker one from the 15th century and the lighter one from the 14th century:


Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB, 76 E 4, Folio 13v
A wild goat (caper).




Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB, KA 16, Folio 51r
A wooly goat with a beard.


And from one of the above manuscripts comes this bull, which resembles the VMS Taurus in terms of its build and lyre-shaped horns (still no basket though):


Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB, KA 16, Folio 70r
A grinning bull with horns shaped like a lyre.

I don't think these served as the basis for the VMS illustrations but they may derive from the same tradition.