(08-09-2025, 08:28 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.From the plants to the nymphs or the zodiac signs, they look like something a child of six or seven could have drawn.
Some details -- like the playful variation of dresses, hats, hairdos, and "tub" decorations in the first Zodiac pages, and the bath antics in the Bio section -- do give the impression that the Scribe indeed had the mind of a child under 10.
On the other hand, the handwriting and skillful "driving" or the pen seem to imply that the Scribe was at least in his early teens. By that age I already could produce neat handwriting when I wanted to, and could make drawing as complicated as any in the VMS, with details just as small, even using a steel pen. (Besides, an age in early teens would be consistent with his fondness for naked nymphs...)
On the third hand, in my early teens I could paint with tempera much better than the VMS Painter(s) did. I am sure that the original Scribe could do the same. That is one of the reasons why I believe that the painting was done much later than the scribing and drawing.
Anyway, the Scribe clearly was no Archimedes. I already noted his inability to properly draw cylinders and plants in perspective. But it seems that he had not yet learned the concept of "measurement", and that he felt that "horizontal", "vertical", "straight", "parallel", and "equidistant" were sophisticated notions that did not apply to his profession.
He appears to have used a compass to draw the circles in the Cosmo and Zodiac sections. I think I can see a pinhole at the center of several diagrams, where the dry point of the compass should have been planted. But the radii seem to be all different, and the circles are not always concentric. Moreover some diagrams are oversize and/or off-center so that they run into the folds of the folio.
The traces of those circles may have been in some sort of pencil rather than ink; either they were very thin and light to start with, or they have mostly faded away. (Several parts of those circles were visibly retraced
in free hand at later times.) However the original circles often fail to close, missing their starting points by a millimeter or more; possibly because the parchment moved and warped during the operation.
He obviously did not even try to plan the filling of the Zodiac circles. A decent illustrator would have divided each band into the necessary number (5, 10, or 20) or equal sectors, and then would draw each nymph within her allotted sector. Instead our Scribe started drawing nymphs around the 12:00 position and went clockwise, drawing each nymph without regard for its position or width. Only when he got past the 06:00 position he started squeezing the nymphs more and more in an attempt to fit the required number. An attempt that often failed, hence those nymphs "standing out of the door" atop the diagram.
The same disregard for uniformity and/or inability to divide the circle in N equal parts is visible in several Cosmo diagrams. He could divide circles into 4 or 8 parts, but the latter often had unequal size. On some diagrams it looks like he intended to draw N rays or sectors; but, as in the Zodiac, just went on drawing sector after sector with no plan, and ended up with N-1 or N+1 sectors. Where the plan was to have an even number of sectors alternating between two styles, this error created a "collision" at the end, which he apparently fudged in some clumsy way.
On page f67v1, for example the Sun at the center has 18 rays, but there are only 17 radial text lines, one of them seemingly shared by two rays at ~02:00. Does that discrepancy have some cosmological significance, or was it just another blunder by the Scribe?
All the best, --jorge