Sam, Koen
If I might make a couple of "iconographic analyst" sort of remarks.
There are always two issues which need always to be addressed when it comes to preferred comparisons for an image.
One is
style as such. An Egyptian, or Libyan or Greek painter will paint or draw vines from a certain habit and training, regardless of which vine they mean to depict. Style, in general, is an important indicator for provenancing first enunciation, and it amazes me how often people look for the 'thing' and forget that the same 'thing' in a different style indicates a different origin. I mean, for example - anyone can draw a cat.
How the cat is drawn is the thing.
It's great to see you two addressing that vital issue of stylistics.
The other issue, though, is
signification (or
intention) and in Voynich studies there is too rarely any effort made to rightly understand what the draughtmen (*meant* to convey. People constantly assume he meant whatever they think looks familiar from their own point in time and environment.
But assume you've correctly identified the style ... Egyptian or Libyan or Greek or whathaveyou ... then you have to ask whether this particular vine in folio 17r is intended to resemble a grape-vine in particular? How would an Egyptian draw any other sort of vine? What did the original maker of the image on f.17v
intend us to read here? That takes rather more work, unfortunately. Especially since we know that the plants aren't literal images of individual plants (or, to be polite, that not all of them can be literal images of real specimens).
I guess what I mean is that it's not enough to walk like an Egyptian, you have to think like one, sometimes.