Koen and everyone,
I think it is not fair to confuse a person's skill with limits to their knowledge; nor it fair to suppose that everything which doesn't agree with the conventions of medieval Mediterranean peoples expectations is "lesser" sort of art.
For example: that medieval elephant Koen shows isn't badly drawn at all; it's just ill-informed. Look at the way the "hoofs' are drawn. They are perfect for an ox, or some other animal of that kind.
It is also interesting that the superstructure, in which the men are put, is very close to being right - and that's something the draughtsman is most likely to have only heard about from a book, or a traveller's account, or another image (not necessarily one of European origin, nor in a manuscript).
One thing that draughtsman did have in common with us, is that he thought a picture should be a 'portrait of facts' - a photo sort of picture.
But not everyone saw picture-making as an exercise in "looky-like" and many other peoples would have thought that a total waste of time and paint. Even the Roman writers thought Dioscorides' way of picturing plants (pictures-of-thing) weren't as valid or informative as schematic images which gave a lot more information.
Now, the VMS draughtsmen could really draw. I don't mean the people who worked to make our present manuscript, but the people who first set down the images as they came to be copied in our present work.
They could draw - look at the lovely curves of back and belly of the figures in the bathy section as example, the facility and confidence with which an armpit is expressed, or how heads (however distorted) are set upon their necks.
Right - so if the draughtsmen
could draw, but they didn't draw as we would prefer - it was a cultural thing, or a product of ignorance... or both. That picture of the elephant is wrong because of the draughtsman's ignorance not his lack of skill, and at the same time it is presented in the way it is - with attempted literalism - for cultural reasons: it's what people of his culture expected of a picture.
So in the same way, the Voynich draughtsmen could draw; I don't think they could have been entirely ignorant of a woman's appearance (though it's possible), so the way the 'ladies' appear in the bathy- section and those months where the figures are unclothed - is a cultural thing.
For some reason there was a real reluctance on the part of the 'first' enunciators of these images to depict a living being (including animals) in any literal way. That wasn't all that unusual in the older world, or east of Latin Europe.
I might also mention that golden hair had significance apart from literal fact, and that people could use any colour of paint they wanted to colour the hair of star/angel/ hour type figures. Significance, not literalness, is often the reason for such choices. We don't even know whether Christ's mother Mary ever owned a blue cloak .. it's blue because of the colour's significance. Same with hair-colour in many cases.
Some Centres in the calendar roundels are very different from all other imagery in the manuscript, in all respects including the presumption that pictures should be literal "pictures of" and not "pictures about" heir significance.
The most obviously 'modernised' is, of course, the archer. I doubt it looked as it does now until the early fourteenth century, but I do think its human form always pointed the bow downwards, regardless of the type of bow or clothing now given it.
On the other hand, the Balances still testify to an antique original form, one never employed in Europe, and not known in the Mediterranean as far as I have been able to discover, after about the 3rdC AD.
That hand that Koen mentions is perfectly beautiful; accomplished in drawing. I could show you dozens of similarly long-fingered graceful hands in exactly that gesture: mainly Buddhist. I agree with Koen's point about the "elephant-leaf". However, I read it as a reference to a plant used for a dye - and particularly at the festival of Holi, when elephants are traditionally dressed up and people hurl lots of dye about. Big event on the calendar of anyone who sells vegetable dyes, even now.
But Koen reads that elephant as an elephant... and that's ok too. Having a different opinion is no justification for hostility: that way madness lies.