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Pisces (Folio 70v) and the New Year on the 1st of March in the Republic of Venice
- Pisces (Folio 70v) and the New Year on the 1st of March in the Republic of Venice
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RE: Pisces (Folio 70v) and the New Year on the 1st of March in the Republic of Venice
Jorge_Stolfi > 03-06-2025, 04:47 PM
One must be wary of reading too much into the details of the Zodiac drawings.
Based on the style of the "nymphs", I would guess that Zodiac was the first section of the VMs to be written (or at least the first section with nymphs); and the Scribe was still learning to draw them, changing and simplifying the figures as he/she went along, eventually dispensing with the tubs, dresses, and star tails altogether. He/she also experimented with different diagram layouts -- two pages of 15 nymphs each (Aries, Taurus), a big two-panel diagram with 30 nymphs (Pisces), and eventually one-panel diagrams.
Moreover, he/she was very bad at geometry, and did not know how to (or care to) evenly divide a circle into the required number of sectors. Thus, in at least a couple of diagrams, he/she left too much space between the first few nymphs, forcing him/her to squeeze the last few nymphs together at the end. Eventually he/she simply gave up, and drew on top of the diagram the 4-5 nymphs who could not fit inside the circles.
On Pisces, in particular, my theory is that he/she was short of two nymphs at the end of the outer band. To amend that he/she drew the nymph at 11:30 with the barrel overlapping the previous barrel and turned the other way, so that the two nymphs would not overlap. Even so, the count was one short, so he/she drew one more star between the two fishes to fix the star count (which presumably was more important than the nymph count).
Another diagram with a star in the central disk is Scorpio. In the diagram there are 30 nymphs and 30 stars, so this extra star may seem to break the "30 per diagram" rule. However, the star in the inner band at 05:00 lacks the pen-drawn outline, and the corresponding nymph is missing the left arm that should be holding the star. The star is only painted with the light yellow tempera paint; and, while all other stars are tail-less, that star is connected to the nymph by an ersatz tail -- also painted, not drawn.
Thus my theory is that the Scribe, when drawing the Scorpio diagram, omitted both the arm and star of that nymph by mistake. After finishing the diagram, he/she counted the stars (not the nymphs!); and since there were only 29, he/she tried to amend the mistake by adding another star at the center (with no label, since he/she could not figure out which one was missing). Only later, the Light Painter (the person who applied the light yellow watercolor on hairdos and stars; which may or may not have been the same as the Scribe) noticed the arm-less and star-less nymph, and so improvised the missing star and tail.
To further complicate matters, many years later another person (the "Retracer") went through the manuscript, retracing many faded glyphs and figure details in a distinctive very dark ink. He may have been the same who retraced some lines of page f67r2 with red ink. But this Retracer also added some fancy details that apparently were not in the original (such as the crowns and multi-lobed "shower caps" on some of the Zodiac nymphs, e.g. the outer one at 05:30 on Scorpio). And then another person (the "Dark Painter" -- maybe the same as the Retracer, but probably distinct from the Light Painter) clumsily filled or smeared many figures with opaque tempera-like colors, sometimes obscuring parts of the drawing. -
RE: Pisces (Folio 70v) and the New Year on the 1st of March in the Republic of Venice
R. Sale > 03-06-2025, 06:38 PM
One must be wary of what is read into the VMs Zodiac illustrations. There is an overall pattern in the medallions of first five houses of the VMs Zodiac sequence where the "inhabitants' for each month are paired. Two pairs of aquatic animals paired by combination and two pairs of terrestrial animals paired by division. VMs Gemini is not a 'Castor and Pollux' pairing of likes. It is a "Holy Marriage" pairing of complementary opposites.
The purpose is to introduce pairing as a meme, which is then carried over into the armorial and ecclesiastical heraldry of VMs White Aries. -
RE: Pisces (Folio 70v) and the New Year on the 1st of March in the Republic of Venice
Dobri > 08-06-2025, 01:37 PM
The city of Venice was known to have the shape of a fish.
The map of Venice shown below is from Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun, 1541-1622 and Franz Hogenberg, 1540-1590, engraving.
![[Image: GettyImages-170620073.jpg]](https://res.cloudinary.com/odysseytraveller/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto,dpr_auto,w_765,h_536,c_limit/https://cdn.odysseytraveller.com/app/uploads/2019/03/GettyImages-170620073.jpg)