R. Sale,
I think that as a philosophical and methodological question, the title of this thread is potentially very interesting.
As you might have noticed, there are several methods employed by people presently engaged in researching the manuscript's origins, purpose, language and script.
Relatively recently, for example, Marco Ponzi began to use what he calls a 'binary' method, but which when I introduced it a few years ago, I explained as the 'sieve' method. The 'binary' method is very useful for cataloguers because it helps computerise image catalogues, though personal experience leads me to think it inadequate for provenancing work and I wouldn't use less than a seven-point sieve myself. The example I published used a nine-point - but it was just as example of how it helps find appropriate comparisons.
Otherwise, many are content to match what they perceive in the images, and what they personally see as the most salient details with images that occur in their chosen period and place of interest, and many add a further limit on restricting their search to one medium: manuscript art.
So there are different ways to go about this. What many people have tried to say before me, I think, is that there is no evidence to show that the patterns were intended by the makers to refer to European heraldry. Since you leave out so many patterns - such as the smaller circle inside a larger circle - and you do not address any other section or set of images, so it becomes very difficult to understand how your theory helps us understand the wider purpose of this manuscript. Surely it isn't a book about heraldry?
There's another point, too. I think many people agree that the dressed figures and red hats are in some sense a late addition to the images. So even if you were correct about the red galero, it wouldn't help us understand the earlier levels of this imagery. I'm not sure I've expressed that last point very well, but I acknowledge that while it is evident to me that not everything in the manuscript was first enunciated in early fifteenth century Europe, others hold the theory that it is all an original creation by some fifteenth-century European. I don't wish to provoke an argument on that last point; people must draw what conclusions they can from one of the few indisputable facts we have, which is the primary document.
I think that as a philosophical and methodological question, the title of this thread is potentially very interesting.
As you might have noticed, there are several methods employed by people presently engaged in researching the manuscript's origins, purpose, language and script.
Relatively recently, for example, Marco Ponzi began to use what he calls a 'binary' method, but which when I introduced it a few years ago, I explained as the 'sieve' method. The 'binary' method is very useful for cataloguers because it helps computerise image catalogues, though personal experience leads me to think it inadequate for provenancing work and I wouldn't use less than a seven-point sieve myself. The example I published used a nine-point - but it was just as example of how it helps find appropriate comparisons.
Otherwise, many are content to match what they perceive in the images, and what they personally see as the most salient details with images that occur in their chosen period and place of interest, and many add a further limit on restricting their search to one medium: manuscript art.
So there are different ways to go about this. What many people have tried to say before me, I think, is that there is no evidence to show that the patterns were intended by the makers to refer to European heraldry. Since you leave out so many patterns - such as the smaller circle inside a larger circle - and you do not address any other section or set of images, so it becomes very difficult to understand how your theory helps us understand the wider purpose of this manuscript. Surely it isn't a book about heraldry?
There's another point, too. I think many people agree that the dressed figures and red hats are in some sense a late addition to the images. So even if you were correct about the red galero, it wouldn't help us understand the earlier levels of this imagery. I'm not sure I've expressed that last point very well, but I acknowledge that while it is evident to me that not everything in the manuscript was first enunciated in early fifteenth century Europe, others hold the theory that it is all an original creation by some fifteenth-century European. I don't wish to provoke an argument on that last point; people must draw what conclusions they can from one of the few indisputable facts we have, which is the primary document.