Koen G > 04-02-2017, 12:22 PM
davidjackson > 04-02-2017, 02:29 PM
Quote: I'm dealing with a rather dynamic two-and-a-half year old at the moment so I can't answer as elaborately as I should, but I'll give some initial comments already.
Quote: One thing I still don't understand is why people discard the possibility that the manuscript's imagery was copied from an older tradition instead of a 15th century creation. This is not a hypothetical scenario, it happened a lot. I will again refer to the various traditions of astronomical manuscripts, where we see 15th century copies of 9th-10th century manuscripts. These, in turn, were relatively accurate copies of Greco-Roman imagery. So once again, "ancient sources" is a valid possibility that should be considered as much as "medieval creation" and renaissance.For the simple reason that one would expect more sources to have survived. If one copy was made, why not two? Why are we not finding more references to this mysterious line of manuscripts across the corpus of medieval manuscripts we have access to?
Quote:When medieval scribes copied older sources, they would often put contemporary clothes on the figures. Clothing is a huge cultural marker, so adapting it to a "modern" equivalent will make it easier to understand for your audience. This is why it's not unusual to see Hercules as an armored knight sometimes, or rulers as medieval kings. This has happened in the VM, but only in a minority of the figures.Perfectly correct. Why would this be? If it is a copy, why would the copyist do this on some and not others? Is the nudity important? Or are the clothes important? We have no way of saying with the facts at our disposal.
Koen G > 04-02-2017, 11:51 PM
VViews > 05-02-2017, 01:53 AM
Koen G > 05-02-2017, 12:46 PM
Diane > 06-02-2017, 02:24 PM
Quote:we can't pin down a specific era or artistic tendency
Diane > 06-02-2017, 05:36 PM
Quote:If such a secret trader's guide book existed, wouldn't it's contents become utterly obsolete after a thousand years?
Quote:centers of production changed, desirable resources fell out of favor and new ones were sought out, empires rose and fell, alliances were made and broken, places that were friendly could become hostile
Quote:shipbuilding technology advanced
Quote:climate...
Quote:I would think that a guide to trading in the Orient written in 1017 would be utterly useless, and potentially even dangerous to a trader working in 2017 so why would it be different then.
Quote:.. obsolete knowledge..
Quote:And by the way, those provincial mariner books did survive: see the Michael of Rhodes MS I put in the library for one example.
davidjackson > 06-02-2017, 08:41 PM
davidjackson > 06-02-2017, 08:51 PM
Quote:Koen:
Well, most of the elaborately illuminated manuscripts we study were made for rich patrons and cared for in libraries. This is why they survived and we can still see them. But the VM is described by the Beinecke library as a work in "provincial" style, which means that it does not appear to have been made in a major scholarly centre. Manuscripts made for kings, and copies of those manuscripts, were much more likely to survive than any "provincial" works.
Koen G > 06-02-2017, 09:14 PM