19-10-2016, 09:40 PM
If the man with the crossbow is a shooter, then the man with a shovel is a digger. Is the crossbowman a hunter shooting at pheasants or deer, a soldier at war or shooting at targets. Maybe you can think of a few more things to do with a shovel, but there is no real difference.
Anything associated with a person in an illustration can be considered an attribute. The matter relevant to identification depends on whether the attribute is specifically connected to a particular individual, to a certain group or to several groups or various individuals. There is more than story of a saint being stoned to death.
While this line of investigation is interestingly off beat and I appreciate the collection of images, I do not see a positive outcome, for reasons Koen has already listed. If we look at the man with the shovel, what is he digging? We do not know. Why do we not know it? Because the essential data is not in the illustration.
What do we have when we try to identify the problematic examples of hand-held items? We have Koen's list:
"- they occur in relative isolation
- the item does not interact with other nymphs
- the item does not interact with the environment"
In other words, the essential data is absent. Add to that, that the item itself is often ambiguous. It can't even be identified as a crossbow or shovel. It's an illustration of a 'whatsit' doing nothing.
That being said, I am fully in favor of considering the use of attributes as a method of identification. It would be my suggestion that it is better to consider a system of attributes that would have been widely known at the most probable time of the VMs creation. Among the attributes used for identification, heraldry in its armorial and ecclesiastical forms was certainly significant.
Anything associated with a person in an illustration can be considered an attribute. The matter relevant to identification depends on whether the attribute is specifically connected to a particular individual, to a certain group or to several groups or various individuals. There is more than story of a saint being stoned to death.
While this line of investigation is interestingly off beat and I appreciate the collection of images, I do not see a positive outcome, for reasons Koen has already listed. If we look at the man with the shovel, what is he digging? We do not know. Why do we not know it? Because the essential data is not in the illustration.
What do we have when we try to identify the problematic examples of hand-held items? We have Koen's list:
"- they occur in relative isolation
- the item does not interact with other nymphs
- the item does not interact with the environment"
In other words, the essential data is absent. Add to that, that the item itself is often ambiguous. It can't even be identified as a crossbow or shovel. It's an illustration of a 'whatsit' doing nothing.
That being said, I am fully in favor of considering the use of attributes as a method of identification. It would be my suggestion that it is better to consider a system of attributes that would have been widely known at the most probable time of the VMs creation. Among the attributes used for identification, heraldry in its armorial and ecclesiastical forms was certainly significant.