A random rant about the VMS

[Jorge_Stolfi]

After looking at (at least) a few hundred different manuscripts from Switzerland, Tirol, South Germany, Italy and even the Netherlands, from the period 1350-1470, I am: Unable to find a single illustration/illumination style that matches that of the VMS illuminator ... the scribe(s) and illuminator(s) of the VMS must have practiced their art or at least had many years of experience is writing and drawing.,

It seems to be a general consensus that the text and drawings on each page were produced by the same person.  Usually the drawing was done first and then the text was written around or inside it.

It seems that the VMS scribe had some experience writing, since he produced  reasonably regular letters only ~1.5 mm tall. 

However, he was not a professional scribe, as one would find in the scriptorium of a monastery. He did not draw guide lines for the margins, and the baselines of his text are all bent and tilted.

And he had no experience as illustrator. One can follow the evolution of his artistic, erm, skills on the Zodiac pages, from Aries onwards.  He learned to draw a minimally acceptable "nymph" only after 3-4 pages, and hardly improved on it thereafter.

So that may be why his style is so unusual.  Books like the VMS usually were illustrated by professional illustrators...

Unable to find a single handwriting style that matches the calligraphy of the VMS scribe[...]Unable to find a single compelling match for any of the glyphs in the VMS

The script apparently was invented by the Author of the book from scratch, without trying to imitate any existing script of trying to preserve some calligraphic tradition. Like hangul, or the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., or the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

The originality of the handwriting may be simply the originality of the alphabet.

Unable to find a single drawing that is reminiscent of the VMS,

Well, people have found many bits and pieces that apparently were copied (with variable degree of fidelity) from other manuscripts of the time. Like the icons of the Zodiac signs, the dresses and hairdos, use of a wolkenband to separate Earthy from Heavenly domains, and the Four Sages of Life on f85r2.

Unable to find a single compelling explanation for the non-existent plants, vessels and charts in the VMS.

For the plants, one possible explanation is that the VMS is a variant of the so-called "herbals of the alchemists", a genre of bogus herbals with fantastic plants that had some popularity at the time.  In fact there are claims that some details of the VMS plants were copied from those herbals. 

Another possible explanation is that the plants were real but the Author did not know what they looked like.  So he had to create the drawings in order meet the expectations of European doctors and herbalists as to how a herbal should look like.

For the vessels in the Pharma section, I would guess that the Scribe started drawing them from memory, as simple cylindrical jars; but then looked at books or visited an apothecary shop, and learned to draw more complicated shapes.

For the charts, those must have been due to the Author, not the Scribe, and must have come either from his fantasy or imagination, or from some exotic source in "Egypt or other oriental parts".

Just ranting/awing at this masterpiece, that's all.

I would not call it a "masterpiece". It is a remarkable object, that took a lot of work to produce, and the contents may even be valuable to historians and linguists.  But its execution is rough and uneven, probably riddled with mistakes and silly elucubrations...

All the best, --stolfi