The prisoner scenario: a though experiment

[oshfdk]

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

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.

I don't know anything about comparative analysis of images, so the below is just my layperson opinion on the matter, how I would approach it if we talked, for example, about the text.

As you just said, there are many (hundreds?) different depictions of Gemini in medieval works. With all combinations of garments, poses, hairstyles, etc. The fact that after carefully examining this collection someone found an item that is very close to one in the Voynich Manuscipt, but not exact in most details, is no more remarkable than finding two very similar looking pebbles on a beach. This doesn't mean that one of the pebbles was crafted in the image of the other. It's just the simple outcome of examining a large enough sample of pebbles or large enough sample of drawings.

If these three Gemini images above were the only known medieval Gemini images to us, yes, I would say Voynich Gemini is remarkably close to standard medieval depictions of Gemini. But after realizing that there is a considerably large image collection from which people manually picked these three images as the most similar to the Voynich Gemini, I don't find this remarkable and frankly now I'm not even sure the artist of the Voynich MS ever saw these particular images, let alone used them as a reference. Suppose the author randomly drew some other version of Gemini with a different pose, just the same there would be some other three images of Gemini that look the most similar to the new Voynich image. Nothing strange about that.

In any case, even if the author used one of these three images as a reference, a mixup of details makes it more likely to me that she or he didn't have an actual copy on hand. What do you think?

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.

To me a "hermit" is usually a person who withdraws from society, not a person born and raised as an outcast. So a hermit could very well be familiar with most cultural trends up to the point when they left the society.