Was the VMS artist a fan of Michael Scot?

[Bernd]

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.

I do exactly the same thing when I need to draw something.
I'm unable to come up with imagery on a blank page without a framework so I search vaguely similar (but thematically often unrelated) images and modify and combine them until a satisfactory product is reached.

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.

The problem with this hypothesis is that richly illuminated manuscripts were heinously expensive treasures. Much like today, a nobody can't waltz into a library and request to browse and copy the most valuable books - for good reasons. It doesn't even work in public libraries, let alone in private collections. And I doubt the VM imagery came from a monastic or university library. How did a poor commoner gain access to such high-level and exclusive source material? A more likely scenario is that he was somehow involved with the artists that created such imagery.

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.

It also works the other way round. The artist came in contact with people from different regions. He wouldn't have needed to go everywhere. Taccola however never traveled. Either Sigismund's alleged copy of his notebook did (to the council of Basel or indeed - to Barbara of Cili in Hungary/Bohemia) or the VM artist must have visited him in Tuscany.