This image comes from a description in a Sotheby's catalogue, 24 June 1980, lot 68, which Chrisopher de Hamel describes as
"three types of marginal markings: a hand with a triangular cuff and long pointing finger, a group of 4 dots arranged in a saltire pattern, and (most distinctive of all) a mark like a sideways icecream cone"
I have recently added images of such markings to the MLGB3 website (about which I will blog at a later date), including these two:
Rather than ice-cream cones, the marks suggest to me a human eye, seen in profile: a round eyeball to the left, and the two eyelids converging at a point to the right. Just as pointing hands / manicula are a natural way of drawing a reader's attention to specific parts of a text, so too an eye seems like a logical way to indicate that the reader should look closely at a particular passage.
No comments:
Post a Comment
** PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR NAME IN YOUR COMMENT **
I may ignore and delete anonymous comments