Water, earth and air

[Linda]

There is a connection to the "Oresme" cosmos, but it is not through Oresme as much as it through the Parisian artists decades later.

Yes! I looked into this awhile ago. Oldest surviving copy of Oresme's Treatise of the Sphere (from before his death) is Oxford, St John's College, MS 164, the diagrams there do not look like the one we know with the cloud band similarities, the top part was not parted in two sideways, but instead was layered, with habitable between two inhabitables, too cold and too hot. So the inverted TOs that we have seen are something separate from the Oresme tradition. Cloudband version is thought to be from circa 1420 I believe. I saw a notation on the manuscript that in 1967 they hadn't identified the artist, perhaps some new investigations could be made now if that remains the case.

There was another sphere in a manuscript dated between 1425 to 1449, that looks similar to the cloudband one, sans cloudband but reversed at the top, but is not from a copy of Oresme. I couldn't find it just now. So this idea was travelling around on its own at the time.

I just came across this one by accident. It is interesting, I found it in a blog where the guy couldn't understand why water would be heavier than earth when the other two were correctly placed. Oresme had said water and earth have different centers of gravity and earth being the more noble was lighter. So maybe this is an Oresme based diagram too. That and the cloudband made it seem worth mentioning, plus it has water earth air and fire so seems appropos to the thread in general. I don't know what it says in the manuscript it is from, didn't find the full page yet.


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I saw a date of 1435-1440 and one that said late 15th century. I found another page from the same item and it has another similar cloudband along with Voynichy looking stars. British Library Additional 37049. 

I think all of these we have seen before though.