Can scribal hands be correlated to imagery? Let's look at faces!

[LisaFaginDavis]

I've been giving this question a LOT of thought over the years, focusing on the faces as well. My current thinking is that the plants were likely drawn by their scribes, but that a single artist did the figures and faces throughout. In general, without archival or other external evidence, there is no real way to "prove" that a scribe was also an artist, but in the VMS the correlation of Koen's two plant styles with scribal corpora certainly suggests that, at least in the herbal section, scribes and artists were likely the same. This is supported by the fact that in at least one case, a plant component in the pharm. section (Scribe 1) calls back to a Scribe 2 herbal page but is drawn using the same characteristic features for Scribe 1 plants: the root on 99v, 2nd from the left on the third row, has the typical Herbal A root-line, but the Herbal B version on 34v doesn't. That's hardly enough for a definitive argument, but it is suggestive.