"Dragon" 25v

[Jorge_Stolfi]

[BnF Gallica Latin 17848]
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Those pages are from a so-called Alchemist Herbal which seems to be another version of the one that was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Those two images you posted are Marco's #1 and #43. Both are plants that are claimed to be good for snake bites:

• #1 Herba Antolla minor / Antola minor: "...Take some of this herb, crush it, make a poultice and put it upon a bite; it immediately relieves the pain and removes poison. ..."
  
• #43 Herba Paroiscas / Paroischas / Paroyschas: "For healing a snake bite. Take this herb and plaster it on the bite; it removes pain and poison, and this is proven. Also, this herb has this virtue that if someone carries it with them, a snake cannot approach but flees when it smells the scent of this herb. ..."
  

The plant illustrations in Marco's version are similar to those you posted, but there is no dragon.  The text mentions snakes but not dragons.

It would be useful to see more examples of these "herbs" in other "Achemist Herbals".  Based on this massive corpus of two samples (and some of Marco's comments), I conjecture that in fact there was only one "Alchemist Herbal", which was copied, mutated, truncated, and augmented through hundreds of copies by hundreds of scribes.  Has someone read Toresella's book about them?

And I conjecture also that the original Alchemist Herbal was like Marco's, without dragons.  The dragons in BnF Lat.17848 were added by one of these scribes, somewhere along the chain of copying that led to that version.  At first it may have been a snake fleeing from #43 or vomiting in reaction to its smell. But I conjecture that, in the cottage industry that produced those books, the scribe who wrote the text was not the same person as the artist who drew the illustrations.  The former had to know Latin, the latter did not. Since he could not read the text, the artist responsible for the mutation thought that the snakes were only decorative and so he "enhanced" them to dragons spitting fire...

The scribe of VMS f25v, on the other hand, was responsible for the whole page, text and figures. I presume that he copied the text from the Author's draft, copied some parts of the plant (root,maybe leaves) from the Author's sketches or from the Pharma section, and made up the rest -- sometimes from his imagination, occasionally from plants from his garden, but often (as on f25v) by copying random elements from an Alchemist Herbal.  Which happened to have dragons, although rather different from those of BnF Lat.17848

Either option shows the artist to be an amateur

That is quite an understatement...

messed up the foot then added a quick fix with the foot poking from behind belly

Quite possibly. But I suspect that it was actually a later Restorer who misunderstood an half-erased tail and "restored" it as a third foot.  As you noted, the ink strokes on the whole dragon are thicker and darker than those on the plant.

All the best, --stolfi