(06-11-2016, 01:44 PM)MarcoP wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in Trento there are frescoes illustrating the 12 months. They were painted in 1400 ca.
The frescoes seem to represent both dovetail merlons (even if most represented crenelations have no dovetails) and flag finials towers. Details from the months of January (left) and May (right).
Marco, it's interesting that you found both of these expressed in a Trento manuscript. Trento was an important university town with a good library, and was an important stopping point for travelers crossing the mountains. It is also significant for having produced a sexually explicit manuscript not too long after the VMS (in the medical rather than pornographic sense) at a time when such manuscripts were rare. I haven't been able to find a copy online (only a couple of sample pages), but it bears some similarity to the subject matter in the VMS.
If you combine this information on the use of merlons and flags with some history from a century before the VMS, when Dante's Divine Comedy satirized the conflict between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs in a way that evolved into the Capulets and Montagues in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, you get a feel for how this political conflict between papists and the cultural elements (artists, scientists) was symbolically expressed in medieval art. Just as the red rose and white rose were important symbols for alchemy (and for political conflicts in England), square merlons and swallowtail merlons were important symbols for conservative and liberal branches of society and for conflicts that some (like Dante) felt were divisive and destructive.
The saddleback flags and the globes might not be political. They might be regional/cultural, or they might have political elements known only to people in medieval times. I haven't studied them enough yet to know for if they are significant beyond their decorative differences. Could the direction of the flags mean something? The direction of fingers in medieval manuscripts frequently had meaning (they could be attributes, dates, numbers, or allegorical messages depending on how they were drawn), so maybe the direction of the flags is significant as well. I tend to think the direction may not matter, but the fact that the flags were used in very specific regions at that time does seem significant.