(30-06-2023, 09:28 AM)nablator wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Some coincidental structural resemblance should be expected when comparing drawings of hundreds of mostly normal-looking plants (if the weird parts are overlooked) to other drawings of hundreds of mostly normal-looking plants. The opposite would be extraordinary.
Well, the illustrations in the Materia Medica are quite stylized, though. What I would call "normal looking plants" are the illustrations in later works where you can recognize them (with a little imagination). In the 15th century, the depiction of plants was still dependent on the particular tradition. Therefore, the hit rate of a randomly selected double page in the Materia Medica is quite remarkable ( 5 out of 8, compared to about 140 plants in the VMS ).
Basically I see the comparison with other plant manuscripts as a basis to get something like a categorization at all.