Aries Design: Truly Aries, or actually based on Capricorn?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

In my opinion, the left animal in Barb.lat.157 is quite obviously a sheep and was meant to be a sheep. It has a sheeps tail, sheeps build, sheep neck, and a ram's horns and the lack of a beard. It fits right in with the vast majority of ram depictions across centuries of manuscript examples, but does not fit in with common goat depictions at all. It isn't actively climbing at a tree either, but even if it was, they drew a sheep doing something a sheep doesn't do.

You are right, that is a better interpretation of that figure.

It is for this reason that I believe that VMS aries is a depiction of a goat, even if meant as aries. Only 1 aspect of the goat is missing: the beard. The rest is straight up standard goat imagery. Many manuscripts have capricorns that are basically a slightly altered aries and vice versa, similar to the "scorpio is cancer with a wiggly thin tail" situation elsewhere.

OK...  So there are various scenarios:

• The Author told the Scribe to draw the Aries icon, but the Scribe did not know the Zodiac and copied the Capricorn icon instead;
  
• The Author told the Scribe to draw a sheep, but the Scribe could not tell goat from sheep and copied a picture of a goat instead;
  
• The Scribe copied the icon of Aries from a book that depicted it as a beardless goat.
  
• The Author himself could not tell a goat from a sheep, and gave the Scribe the picture of a goat to copy on those pages.
  
• ...
  

By the way, it seems that beardless goat breeds are common in countries with hot climates, like Spain, Egypt, the Middle East, Southern India, Vietnam, and (ahem) Southern China...

All the best, --stolfi