17-12-2016, 11:35 AM
Linda, I've been giving some thought to this too, especially after I saw a really different "zodiac man" a couple of years ago (it's been posted recently on the forum, you might remember it, and I laughed when I saw it... it's a woman from behind, emphasizing her curves and especially her buttocks, rather than the usual man-from-front).
A high proportion of the manuscripts that feature a number of sections of what one might call medieval "medical knowledge" include a "zodiac man", but not all of them have diagrams and not all of them used the traditional picture of a man with lines (or proximity) indicating which zodiac symbol relates to a specific part of the body.
The more of these documents I read (rather than just looking at the pictures), the more I realized there are many more ways of representing this concept than I initially realized from looking at pictures.
What if (this is a "what if" that I've been turning over in my mind for a while)... chunks of the VMS are based on UNILLUSTRATED texts? Most people tend to look for illustrated exemplars when researching a manuscript's provenance. I was actually quite embarrassed that it didn't occur to me earlier than a year ago that the "exemplars" for illustrations are sometimes textual descriptions and once it dawned on me, of course, it seemed very obvious (it was one of those D'oh!! moments). There is always a "first" manuscript that has illustrations—the first herbal illustrations, the first anatomical illustrations, the first zodiac man, etc.
I think it's reasonably clear that the VMS illustrator had seen illustrations in other manuscripts, some of them follow convention, but... I sometimes wonder if parts of the manuscript are pictorial interpretations of text that didn't have images and that's why they don't follow traditional models.
A high proportion of the manuscripts that feature a number of sections of what one might call medieval "medical knowledge" include a "zodiac man", but not all of them have diagrams and not all of them used the traditional picture of a man with lines (or proximity) indicating which zodiac symbol relates to a specific part of the body.
The more of these documents I read (rather than just looking at the pictures), the more I realized there are many more ways of representing this concept than I initially realized from looking at pictures.
What if (this is a "what if" that I've been turning over in my mind for a while)... chunks of the VMS are based on UNILLUSTRATED texts? Most people tend to look for illustrated exemplars when researching a manuscript's provenance. I was actually quite embarrassed that it didn't occur to me earlier than a year ago that the "exemplars" for illustrations are sometimes textual descriptions and once it dawned on me, of course, it seemed very obvious (it was one of those D'oh!! moments). There is always a "first" manuscript that has illustrations—the first herbal illustrations, the first anatomical illustrations, the first zodiac man, etc.
I think it's reasonably clear that the VMS illustrator had seen illustrations in other manuscripts, some of them follow convention, but... I sometimes wonder if parts of the manuscript are pictorial interpretations of text that didn't have images and that's why they don't follow traditional models.