(31-08-2018, 10:14 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anton: I do see some parallels with the VM circles, even though the contents are clearly different. I wonder if more of such images existed.
Has anything like this been found before? A personification of an abstract concept in a central disk, surrounded by a circular row of labelled human figures.
The general layout is discussed by Barbara Obrist in You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.. In the diagrams she presents, the central personifications can represent the Sun and the Moon, or the Year, but in Christian art also God as the creator is common. In the Reims illustration, the central figure is Air. In the Alencon ms, it is an unlabelled king that I cannot identify. Hildegard's illustration is more complex: the figure at the centre is a king holding the Sun and the Moon in his hands (the Year, I guess): similarly to the Voynich zodiac pages, the surrounding personifications are arranged in several concentric circles, but here the circles represent different sets of entities (seasons, winds, the weather). Hildegard's illustration contains the parallel for the Voynich "cannon ball" You are not allowed to view links.
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Darren Worley pointed out on the site of Stephen Bax a Breviari d'Amor illustration (Yates Thompson 31) in which each of the seven planets holds a tethered star: in this case the centre of the diagram is not a personification, but an abstract circle of many colours. A similar diagram of the seven planets in a German ms (that I could not trace) has a human figure at its centre.
BNF Fr.857 is another Breviari D'Amor manuscript that contains a similarly arranged illustration of the Angelic hierarchies: this illustration is interesting because the angels are arranged in several irregular circular segments, apparently in order to squeeze all of the in the page. The result is similar to what can be observed in the VMS signs from Gemini to Sagittarius. The angels are not individually labelled: there are titles for each angelic order.
The Voynich zodiac illustrations form a cycle of pages with a similar layout, all featuring a zodiac medallion at the center. Similar cycles appear in three Alphonsine works:
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - there are exactly 30 scenes around each zodiac sign; the scenes are labelled and each of them is composed of images derived from asterisms; many of the scenes include a single person, but some have two people and others show animals instead.
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - again, there are exactly 30 radial segments around each zodiac sign. Each segment includes a personification (an angel) and one or more star represented as golden dots on small images of the constellations. The radial segments are not labelled, but they are individually discussed in the text and each is associated with both an asterism and a specific stone.
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a star catalogue (Libros del saber de astronomia). Each of the constellations (not the 12 zodiac signs) has its own page, with its emblem in the central medallion. Each of the surrounding radial segments represent a star of the constellation, so the number of the radial items surrounding each constellation is variables. The radial items are short paragraphs or text, with no illustrations.
In these three works, the astronomical illustrations in the central medallions are not labelled.