Nymph Proportions

[Sam G]

The young man on top of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is 5.4 heads tall, which is a full head more than the median. He is the least "compact" figure I measured. It is interesting that the pen lines appear to betray some uncertainty or correcting around his rump.

I wonder if this "nymph" may have been distorted (relative to the VMS norm) for some reason relating to the way the text and illustrations are interlocked.  Perhaps the illustrator realized he was going to need to leave enough room for five lines of text beneath the arms so he made the body a bit bigger than usual.  This consideration wouldn't have affected the other nymphs you measured, since they aren't surrounded by blocks of text.

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Another possibility to think about: something that I think was originally suggested by Philip Neal is that the VMS may be a copy of a work that was physically larger than the VMS itself.  If so, then all of the images would have necessarily been scaled down.  But as the VMS is quite small, this might have made it difficult to draw faces on the heads.  So perhaps the heads were all increased in size relative to their bodies in order to make it a bit easier to draw faces.