(26-11-2025, 02:07 AM)Bernd wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.German Wikipedia says that the Fathers of Botany (Otto Brunfels, Hieronymus Bock, Leonhart Fuchs) could not determine which species the viola (Ion) in Dioscorides was supposed to be.
To put things in perspective, the genus Viola is quite complicated. There are about ~40 different species of Viola in Italy alone and they are difficult to classify (personal experience). There are basically two groups (morphologically, at least):'odorata'-like violas and 'tricolor'-like violas.
'Odorata' violas have flowers with only two petals pointing upwards and 2 more pointing sub-horizontally (the last one points downwards), while 'tricolor' flowers have four petals pointing upwards (and the last one points downwards as before). 'Odorata' often flower in early spring (or even earlier, depending on altitude), 'tricolors' flower later.
'Odorata' flowers are smaller and violet to blue to white (they can have different colours even in the same species), 'tricolor' flowers are more colorful, with many yellow and pink species. However, the flowers are mostly monochromatic, with the exception of Viola tricolor and possibly Viola calcarata which can have yellow at the center of the flowers too (it can also have completely yellow flowers... in general, the colour of the flowers is a poor diagnostic tool for the genus Viola).
Violas are quite common, including Viola tricolor, and are well-known to people (Viola tricolor is called 'viola del pensiero', but I'm sure this is a late term). Distinguishing at glance an 'odorata' from a 'tricolor' is very easy (and the VMS 'viola' surely resembles a real Viola tricolor a lot), but anything beyond that requires some botanical knowledge, and it's a difficult task already on real specimens, and worse on drawings.
Sorry for not posting references, but they come from books (Pietro Zangheri, Flora Italica; David Aeschimann et al., Flora Alpina), and some from memory.