Was the VMS artist a fan of Michael Scot?

[Koen G]

One thing we can say is that the VM artist was on the lookout for images to copy. Apparently some of the things that are hard for beginning artists is posing characters in scenes. Comic book artists in the early 20th century were known to copy compositions from others, simply to learn the trade because there were no reference guides available.

So what were the references for our poor Voynich artist, who clearly wanted to do their own thing but likely lacked formal training? Well, all available imagery of course, from religious iconography to Michael Scot (maybe, if they found a MS somewhere).

Maybe they had a personal sketchbook for this purpose, which would mean that a single visit to a couple of libraries would be enough to collect a wealth of material. Even Taccola: he worked at the university and was connected to other artists, nobility, university staff and students of different nationalities. Plenty of opportunities for several types of people to be allowed to browse his books.

If the "visitor to Taccola" scenario is true, we also don't need to fret over the combination of swallowtail merlons and German-ish imagery & marginalia. We just need to assume that this person visited different regions, which was extremely common in the 15th century.