[split] Taccola spillover thread

[Koen G]

They wouldn't have only taken the basic composition from the Taccola page, but also learned from the way he draws steep shores - kind of like undulating ravines with vertical line patterns. There have been suspicions before that this "hatching" was influenced by some (proto)-renaissance technique. The Voynich artist, being unexperienced at drawing, seems to have explicitly absorbed such techniques, expressing them with varying degrees of success. The one Taccola page is simply the smoking gun, a copy of more than just the general technique.

My view is as follows:

• One or two persons did the VM art. These may or may not have been scribes (irrelevant to the current point). I will use the neutral "they", even though it may have been one person.
  
• They were not trained as an artist and did not have much experience drawing
  
• They had a project (the VM) which required them to draw a lot.
  
• Given their justified insecurities, they relied on whatever examples they could find, often awkwardly adapting them. This is normal and expected; for example, "swiping" is a common practice in comic book illustration You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 
  
• I consider the rainbow bridge a strong "swipe" because not only are various elements of the composition recombined, but also parts of the drawing technique (how to draw steep shores).
  

The fact that the VM artist clearly also copied from other types of sources is irrelevant to judging the Taccola case. If the VM artist was in the mindset of looking for examples they could use in their own art, then any combination of sources is fine. Knowing that the largest proportion of foreigners at the university of Siena were German speakers, we don't even need Marco-Poloesque scenarios to think of someone visiting the university, who may also have had access to common German book types.