Favorite Plant Tournament GROUP D

[Bernd]

By common sense I mean intuitively understanding that when a drawing of a plant shows two branches overlapping, it means one is behind the other and they are not in the same plane and thus physically connected. And that plant shoots generally do not form loops. This is not an achievement of Renaissance, it is basic knowledge of how things work from experience since people began to draw and independent of any culture.

   
   
   

I also propose that root tables originally depicted a patch of soil with plants emerging. Such drawings are sometimes found in contemporary herbals like Munich Cim.79. In Chig.F.VII.159, water plants are depicted in stone basins. The VM author may have misunderstood this soil or stone blocks as part of the rootstock. The 'grass' on some VM roots is evidence of that.

   

And then there is also the likely misunderstanding of perspective in the 'zodiac' section where the animal eats the small shrub in the foreground that originally was a large tree in the background.

Combine this with the odd low-entropy text built from similar stacked building blocks as the images and the nonsensical marginalia. As isolated cases, all these quirks could be seen as coincidence, artistic style or clever encipherment. Maybe it is, but I feel it all fits into the picture of someone non-neurotypical who struggles with certain concepts, perceives the world in an unique way and has trouble to express himself normally. But this person might have found a way to do so in the VM's unique style. But that's just my personal opinion and I admit it's hard to falsify without a generally accepted solution of the VM. That's not good. All I can do is collect evidence for and against this hypothesis and try to weight them. I am equally satisfied if we find strong evidence that points in a different dirtection, I have no personal preference of what the VM 'should' be about and frankly I do not really care. It's just interesting to explore different possibilities.


I have no idea how to reconcile this hypothesis with 5+ scribes and a possible painter though. If the scribes or hands were really were distinct individuals and not a person's artistic evolution over time, and they drew their images too, this would make a mental impairment far less likely.