RE: Sleeve focus thread
R. Sale > 16-12-2022, 07:24 PM
As far as I know, there are two basic types of stars and the VMs uses both. One is the basic, "French", asterisk star, where three short lines of gold paint or ink cross at their midpoints. The other type is drawn with intentional, interior volume. The star's rays consist of two lines, instead of just one, and the crossing point is a hexagon, or whatever. So, these stars are polygonal - made of polygons. Like your examples above.
Maybe, there should be a 'star focus thread' and provenance timeline about polygonal stars in the 1400s. Asterisk stars are everywhere. Question is whether available evidence is fine-grained enough to really demonstrate anything historical.
There is an example to be seen in the 'cosmic comparison' of the VMs cosmos with the cosmic illustrations from BNF Fr. 565 and Harley 334. The historical sources are asterisks and the VMs is polygonal. Likewise, a further comparison of the VMs cosmos shows that the artist has also altered the rest of the representation as much as possible, without changing the underlying, cosmic structure that is common to all three.
This highly simplified cosmic structure, based on an inverted T-O representation of Earth is rather uncommon. Yet, besides sharing a comparable cosmic structure, the two historical sources come close to sharing a common historical provenance. [BNF Fr. 565 from Paris c. 1410 and Harley 334 from Paris in second quarter of 1400s.
The green cloud band / cosmic boundary is clearly based on a nebuly line. Every artist has a different touch. You don't see a green one very often, but it does show that they come in all colors. Or else the artist had no blue paint.