Palatino 766 pipes, pools, cliffs, streams... (by Taccola)

[Koen G]

But the dates of Taccola's work then would imply that the VMS was written on a stash of vellum that was decades old, at least...

Many implications of this connection go against my personal beliefs about the VM. But those are worthless in the face of new evidence.

I wouldn't necessarily say decades old. Making a copy doesn't take more than a year, so if any copies were made, those could have already been elsewhere before 1435 and within the radiocarbon dated range. But yes, it's later than I would have thought.

I also frequently argued against the notion (maybe introduced by Nick Pelling?) that the parallel hatching in the MS showed familiarity with renaissance techniques. While it's still not the subtle cross-hatching we get in later artists, there may have been more truth to that idea than I thought. It does seem to be mimicking drawing techniques straight from a renaissance source.