Discussion of the Konstellations

[Sam G]

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.

This is basically the idea I came up with when I first started studying the VMS about four years ago.  I saw that it was written in some weird language (but using a Latin-based script) and had bizarre but stylistically European illustrations.  The simplest way to account for it, in my mind, was to consider some Marco Polo-type figure traveling off to some far-flung land, learning the language, creating a script for it, then returning to Europe with a mass of primarily textual material.  Then later, someone added illustrations to it, based on the text (and probably also based on other texts which we do not possess).  Adding illustrations to previously unillustrated texts seems to have been a common practice (and remains so today, especially on covers of works of fiction) and I suspect that many/most illustrations accompanying medieval manuscripts must have originated in this way, although I haven't found any sources stating this.

I still think there is possibly something to this idea, though there are some problems with it.  One thing I have become convinced of however is that the illustrations are themselves old, so this process of adding illustrations to the text could not have occurred in medieval times, but must have occurred in ancient times, with the medieval elements representing later modifications.

Ultimately I think the content of the VMS  goes back to the culture in which the language itself originated and therefore will not be found exactly in any known work, including in the sources which have supplied the most convincing stylistic parallels.