Was the VMS artist a fan of Michael Scot?

[Rafal]

Whoever made the VM had access to a lot of high-profile and also obscure imagery. One idea would be that he drew inspiration from the stock image collection of a workshop instead of a library, but this conflicts with Taccola's Palatino 766, which to our knowledge was never widely copied, and the fact that materials and methods used to create the VM do not point to a professional environment. The alternative is that the author indeed had access to a very good collection.

I agree and it actually makes some problem because we have a man (or a group of men) who have access to a lot of books but at the same time are quite bad at drawing and seem not to understand their sources (like turning a rosary into a chain at f85r2). It seems to exclude any people working in a professional manuscript workshop or monks working in a scriptorium.

In another thread I suggested a link to goliards / clerici vagantes - wandering, "eternal" students who usually preferred a tavern over a library, yet had some academical background and friends in academical circles. Through their friends they could have some access to many manuscripts, both German and Italian. The imagery in VM seems quite illogical mixup of many such sources, a kind of medieval collage. That's why we struggle so much with making any sense of it. Parts of pictures make sense but not whole pictures.

For me Voynich Manuscript is something like this: