Are the 1430s the most likely date range for the Zodiac drawings?

[davidjackson]

I am suggesting that it seems very plausible to me that Voynich author(s) copied the central Zodiac drawings from a work of Diebold Lauber.

We only know about Diebold Lauber because he was, by the standards of the time, a masterful self-publicist. I'm sure you could cherry pick a dozen images from another workshop and then convince yourself in six months time to write the same sentence, with a different name.

There are two different arguments being conflated here:
a) Is the VM a derivate work of the Lauber style?
b) Can the VM illustrative style be used to attempt to date the period which they represent?

I fail to see why attempts are being made to link one to the other.

In fact they seem at least highly derivative and I suspect complete copies without any originality at all. It is semantic question perhaps, but I use the term exact copy even if the copy is very badly executed.

That approach is problematic, at best, unless you can prove they were tracing the lines or something.