The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

No, the drawings are certainly evidence for European subject matter, albeit not evidence the subject matter is certainly European. [...] ... European dress, European figures, [...] , and European media point a certain way. [...] The idea that the content of the drawings is a line of evidence for the subject matter of the text is so straightforwardly obvious that I am struggling to articulate how natural it is.

I know, that is a very natural mistake.

Most elements of the drawings are clearly just decoration.  Even if the hairdos and poses of the Zodiac nymphs are encoding some part of the contents, their "European" appearance is certainly not determined by the encoding.   Those are not portraits of specific people.  The Artist could have used winged monkeys, trees, fishes, Inuits in winter clothing with Bantu spears, ... The choice or European-looking ladies with light hair was a decision by the Artist (with or without input from the Author) determined only by the intention of making those diagrams "look nice".

European Architecture

Same observation.  There is no reason to think that the castles in the big fold-out are faithful depictions of real castles.  The whole archipelago is clearly imaginary or symbolic.  The significant contents almost certainly just "there is a castle guarding/blocking the imaginary bridge between these two imaginary islands."   The shape and appearance of the castle, including the merlons, surely were defined by the Artist -- based on castles in his vicinity, on his memory, or on books that he had at hand.

And in fact there are some architectural details in that fold-out that do not quite look European. There is a minaret tower, a volcano, two large baldachins ... and six onion-roof towers at the center.  Which some desperately try to interpret as giant apothecary jars in order to preserve the "European" claim...

Western Zodiac

The only "Western" thing in that Zodiac, besides the decorative nymphs, are the depictions of the signs at the center.  Which are decoration, too.  Surely the Author did not put those drawings there to tell the reader "this is what the sign of Scorpio looks like".  

The Zodiac diagrams themselves are rather unusual for European astrology, because each sign i divided into 30 degrees of arc, 360 in total -- instead of 30/31 days, 365 in total.  That conception was not unknown in Europe; but what is (AFAIK) quite unusual is the division of two signs into halves of 15 degrees.  On the other hand, both of those features are familiar in Chinese astrology.

All the best, --stolfi