Qasr mosaic leopard and VMS Leo/August image

[Sam G]

Well, look at all these pictures of medieval lions.  It's as though I haven't already addressed this topic, and these images somehow contradict something I've said.  But I already posted this comparison table back on page 6:



Now, something I said in my original post, and have repeatedly emphasized throughout this thread, is that I think the VMS Leo image is basically a composite of a classical original with some medieval modifications.  At the very least, it's a copy produced by a medieval illustrator, so of course we should expect at least a subtle medieval stylistic influence of a "subconscious" kind.  And we may need to go beyond even this to account for the position of the tail. So obviously this view is not contradicted by pointing out that there are some similarities between the VMS image and medieval lions.  The question is whether the features of the VMS Leo image can be exclusively derived from images in medieval manuscripts, which I think they clearly cannot be.

Getting back to the comparison table: like I said before, in light of the griffin mosaic find, the idea that the sharp tongue represents a medieval addition probably has to be dropped, since the griffin beak provides a much more precise match.  So I think the MS Walters 734 can probably ignored as an influence.  (It's still possible that the reinterpretation of the beak as a tongue occurred in medieval times, but the point is that we do not need to account for its precise shape with a medieval image.)

That leaves us with the Cod Sang 402, which despite being red instead of blue, is just as good of a comparison in most ways as the images that have been posted more recently, and better in that the tail shape is similar and it's actually a representation of Leo rather than just some arbitrary lion.  So, again, this point has already been addressed, and I will just copy and paste what I wrote above (in response to Marco):


To be clear, the tree-tail still resembles the mosaic tree far more than it resembles any Leo tail I've seen.  I said that before, and you posted Cod Sang 402.  I admit that it's similar in its basic outline, but don't see it as possible that the VMS Leo tree-tail was derived from that image.  The similarity could be due to coincidence, or to a later reshaping of the tree-tail under the influence of something similar to that image.

As far as how we wound up with the tree-tail in the first place, I now think that the precise model I outlined in my original post, where it was formed unintentionally as a result of copying error, is probably incorrect.  More likely it was an intentional choice made by an illustrator somewhere along the chain of transmission to merge the tree and the tail ending, since they were already in the same position after the tail was (at some point) moved.  This is probably not as strange a thing to do as it might seem, when you consider that adding weird endings to lion tails was apparently a pretty common practice in medieval times (as also discussed earlier in the thread).