(26-03-2017, 09:05 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
When you say "the way it is presented appears to be mostly late 14th c and 15th c" what exactly do you mean? Are there specific manuscripts that are more similar to the VM than earlier ones?
The custom of putting circles with text around a image is very old (I found a really old example recently, but it might take time to find it again), as was done with the VMS "zodiacs" but it wasn't
common to do it until the medieval period and the custom was prevalent in the 15th century.
As for the VMS imagery, it bears many similarities to drawings that came out of the Dieboldt/Diepoldt Lauber studio in the mid-1400s. In fact, one of the lizardy animals (I blogged about this some months ago) in the "dead animal" pond is so similar, it's almost as though it was copied. The VMS drawing is not quite as expert as the studio drawing, but it's very much the same style and the VMS palette bears similarities to the palettes of some of the Lauber studio manuscripts as well. It was a secular scriptorium and it's possible it was started by one of Lauber's older relatives (possibly an uncle?). Lauber also gave handwriting lessons in the same general Gothic cursive style as the marginalia on the last page (not the same hand, but the same tradition).
I hunted up some pre-medieval drawings that are of interest because they have some of the same motifs as the VMS. It's from a book on sacraments (it describes the traditions) and the Merovingian and Roman influence are very evident in both the style and the colors. Some of the themes (animals in circles, animals nibbling on plants, pinwheel flowers, etc.) are echoed in the VMS even if the VMS is drawn very differently:
Note the critter with stripes, something more common to African animals than those in Europe.
Note how the roaring "lion" has no teeth or claws (a characteristic that's almost unique to the VMS) yet I'm pretty sure it's a lion. Usually they are drawn with teeth or claws or both.
Note also the zebra-critter's upside-down "heart" motif. It reminds me a bit of the mystery shape above the ram on the last page.
In this case the pinwheels are not juggling balls, as mentioned recently in my blog, they are flowers, and there are a number of them.
The tradition of showing birds and mammals (usually deer or antelopes, but sometimes other critters) nibbling on plants is very common in eastern Mediterranean and Persian manuscripts and not so common in European manuscripts. Often they are marginal images at the bottoms of the pages. Armenian calendars often have them.
So where did this come from, with so many eastern and Roman motifs?
It's Gallic, from the 9th century, Paris. It describes a mixture of Roman and Gallic sacramental traditions (Vatican Reg.lat.316). There's a bit of Celtic influence, as well, but the Roman traditions are the ones that are most evident (it has similarities with Aratea drawings, although it is even more stylized).
Style is an indicator of influence, but we can't rely on it to tell us a manuscript's geographical origin. It's only because we can read the text that we know it's Gallic. Even the age of the diagrams is sometimes difficult to pinpoint. If carbon dating is not possible, paleographic analysis of the text is frequently used to date a manuscript.