Textual Complexity vs. Visual Simplicity

[oshfdk]

That said (and I hope not to offend, I’m a Voynich enthusiast myself!), I wonder whether any other manuscripts from the period show a similar poverty of representation, with drawings that are unrealistic and poorly proportioned.

I'm an amateur at this, but I've checked a few hundred digitized manuscripts when looking for astrological charts, so I suspect that almost all of them were of the same poor quality.

I guess the thing is: we are not that much interested nowadays what these manuscripts say, unless it's something of historical importance. So the manuscripts that get studied, digitized and published are either of some historical importance or art masterpieces of the time. So our expectation of what average quality of drawings to expect from a medieval codex is way above the actual baseline. Among the digitized and actively circulated online, yes, the Voynich MS is an ugly duckling. Among the actual codices of the time, I would guess the artwork is probably ok-ish.

But I've never held a medieval manuscript in my hands, so let's see what people with more exposure to actual manuscripts say.