[Zodiac Rating] VIRGO

[eggyk]

The artists probably never saw the facing direction by itself as symbolically significant.  If there were other things in the drawing, they would probably draw each human figure facing towards the most important element.  Like, all facing towards Jesus, or the King, or the main players in the event that is being illustrated.

But if the artist was copying a human figure from another manuscript, and that would be the only thing in his drawing (like the VMS Virgo), the artist must have copied it in the same orientation as in the original.  Flipping the drawing while copying would make the task harder and more prone to errors.

Therefore, if the goal is to identify possible sources of "inspiration" for the Zodiac drawings, I think that the left-right orientation is a relevant detail.

So if the facing direction is both potentially important and potentially irrelevant, we could test this: 
facing forward/back - facing right - facing left 

Which would give mirror images only a slight downgrade, but would effectively seperate the detail out (and further downgrade facing forward or away, which are clearly totally wrong). Who knows, perhaps the VMS artist took inspiration from a right facing example, but decided he wanted all of the zodiac symbols to face left? The ideal situation with scoring this for me would be that mirrored examples can neatly fit under identical left-facing examples so they form a cohesive group. Having a full difference of 1 might make that more difficult/impossible. 

For the arm direction, this is also difficult. I think that the differences in some of these simply come down to perspective, the specific dress/clothing, and the artist's ability. It isn't out of the question for me that the VMS virgo may have been copied badly from one of those examples. So imo the exact rotation of the shoulder, or the exact angle of the bend of the arms is less important than the fact that the forearms are pointing in the same direction (which was effectively what the current rating was based on). It's also really difficult to score those attributes consistently, while forearm direction is quite clear. 

If we look at the VMS virgo, and actually think about the arm placement, it's possible that if the dress was slightly different, the arm placement would look like this: 

   

For the holding of items, I think it comes down to how we interpret it. Is she actually holding something? If none of this can be ascertained, it's probably better to just have a binary category that addresses whether virgo is depicted alongside a star above the hands. 

And we can definitely add a finger pointing score, but i'm not convinced the VMS virgo really is finger pointing. It could just be a botched attempt at drawing a clenched fist holding something. I do see how it looks that way though, so i'm not sure.