The prisoner scenario: a though experiment

[Koen G]

Nothing here that would require photographic memory, neither the garments, nor the footwear are perfect match?

For the record, I don't think "photographic memory" is a helpful term to use here (or anywhere for that matter, memory is more of a continuum).

But on the art-historian side of things, I'll just object here that "clothing being a perfect match" is not a useful thing to ask of medieval imagery. They would copy poses, compositions, many other things... but clothing? Always the first thing to change.

The fact that so much is similar in the top-right image and the Voynich one is remarkable in that regard. The other images are meant to somewhat kaleidoscopically show how often poses were copied, and how the attributes of the garments can be found in the same context (in this case, successive workshops in Haguenau).

If you want to know how to draw this differently, open any other manuscript and find a couple of people. Or better, try to find a Gemini pair that's more "like" the one in the Voynich. (If you do, I'd genuinely love to see it ) That should give you some idea of how close these actually are.

Anyway, the bottom line for me is that the Voynich artist was aware of the culture around them and very likely had regular access to relevant images. They may or may not have attempted to copy some of those exactly, but even if they did, the results would look different given their poor drawing skills and the strong medieval tendency to alter garments.

To put it differently, people underestimate how much of the artist's cultural surroundings are packed into an image, even if the image itself is unique. For me, the "hermit" scenario is as likely as any New World theory (i.e. extremely unlikely). Everything shows that the manuscript's makers were well-aware of the 15th century European world around them, including iconographic conventions. How they approached that world and how that resulted in this thing that keeps baffling us, that's another question.