Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations

[Jorge_Stolfi]

There have also been generalised statements in printed literature that do not do justice to the subject, suggesting that all plants are fantastic and non-existent.

Well, some plants seem to be real ones, drawn with varying degrees of skill.  But some are almost certainly fantastic.  

In the case of a few common plants, such as Viola tricolor on f9v, the Scribe and/or the Author could have drawn them from natural specimens collected locally.  However, it is not possible that the Author had actually seen all the hundreds of plants presumed to be described in the VMS; much less the Scribe. Thus most plants must have been copied from other books -- by the Author into his draft, or directly by the Scribe.  Like most plants in most herbals were at the time.  

Thus, at best, most plant drawings must be the result of dozens of "telephone game" steps of graphic corruption by illustrators, stretching back several centuries.

However, it seems that some VMS plants were meant to look fantastic.  Like f5v, the Tennis Racket tree, or f40r, the Absurda topologica. Their bizarre features cannot be just the result of the Scribe's five-thumbs artistic level.  The "crib" books probably included some version of the "alchemist's herbal", whose plants are definitely fantastic. (Do we have clear evidence of that, namely details that definitely come from such a source?)

The fantastic drawings imply that those plants did not exist, or that the Author had only a verbal description and had no idea of what it looked like, in whole or in part.  Either way, the Scribe would have been free to make up the missing pieces -- from his imagination, or by combining parts from the "crib" books.

Thus, even the drawings that can be identified as real plants may be just placeholders for other plants, possibly non-existent.  Maybe the text of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is not about Viola tricolor, but about Herba Lunaria and its virtue of falsifying coins and getting one in other people's favor...

All the best, --stolfi