11-09-2016, 02:34 AM
R.Sale,
It constantly surprises me that VMS is so often treated as if it existed in a vacuum.
Iconographic analysis is a talent but it is also one with formal method - a science.
Some methods are popular because they allow number-crunching and that style has been applied to the manuscript: I find it tends to produce results more apparently than genuinely valid, but professionals, like amateurs, will differ about methodology so there's no one answer and it's part of the job to make sure the client doesn't mistake one's informed opinion for some sort of "final truth" which none may debate or dispute.
Rather than trying to re-invent a method here, or accepting whatever interpretation is easiest to relate to, why not read a bit about the science itself?
Though to be honest, one usually spends more time reading about how people thought in a given time and place, and about etymologies, history, literature, attitudes,geography, religion, the heavens, commerce and technologies.. the reading never stops.
Sure you want to do this?
It constantly surprises me that VMS is so often treated as if it existed in a vacuum.
Iconographic analysis is a talent but it is also one with formal method - a science.
Some methods are popular because they allow number-crunching and that style has been applied to the manuscript: I find it tends to produce results more apparently than genuinely valid, but professionals, like amateurs, will differ about methodology so there's no one answer and it's part of the job to make sure the client doesn't mistake one's informed opinion for some sort of "final truth" which none may debate or dispute.
Rather than trying to re-invent a method here, or accepting whatever interpretation is easiest to relate to, why not read a bit about the science itself?
Though to be honest, one usually spends more time reading about how people thought in a given time and place, and about etymologies, history, literature, attitudes,geography, religion, the heavens, commerce and technologies.. the reading never stops.
Sure you want to do this?