While I was browsing about Medieval archery topics including AH questions, I found it a common perception that excluding crossbows and guns, a self bow or Longbow is acutally dominant in archery across not only Britain Isles, but also almost the whole of Continental Europe over Recurve Bows. Most of the questions revolving around the topic was focusing on "Why not Recurve bow is widely accepted" rather than talking about the actual usuage. And most thread assumes different drawbacks on Recurves like complex to made, less strength.etc that are inferior to longbow or self bows.
However, as I'm browsing through Late Medieval Miniature, I found that there are massive amounts of 14-15th century manuscripts from Various European countries depict archers using bows that their limb and nock shapes shows similar Recurved features (see below), and considering those miniatures and manuscripts were ranged across various countries, decades, and authors, it's hard to assume that almost all of them were artistic errors.
Also, most of the manuscripts were depicting either Bible, European history, Arthurian legend or Trojan War with contemporary local weaponry, instead of false depiction of Eastern nomad warriors with European harness like some 13th manuscripts would do. (But maybe I'm wrong because I'm not familiar with some of the context of those manuscripts)
Bohemia: 1
(Some altarpiece depicting St Sebastian shot by Mauretanian archers also depicts recurved bows:
I'm not listing them above because I'm not sure if the choice of the artists for recurved bows was to illustrate a more "exotic" picture of North African soldiers, and also some of those altar were painted after 1450AD.)
So for all these miniatures, can they being used as proofs that the use of Recurved bows in continental Europe in late Medieval were common if not unheard of ? Would it be possible that the European usage of recurved bows were actually overlooked by many, and was actually wide spread across various European countries over Longbow? Are there textual evidence for such assumption?
Or would it be possible that some of this miniature are false artistic depiction of contemporary, that mistaken the shape or even using crossbow limbs to depict self bows, because of a lack of actual bows for reference across those countries?
There are a couple of different patterns with the sources you have provided.
The first is whether the sources are actually depicting a recurve bow, or a longbow with recurved tips. The shape of the limb tips where the string is placed can sometimes look like a recurve, but the bow geometry is very much a longbow. There is evidence that recurve longbows were a thing (citing Mike Loades' War Bows), though the manufacturing process for recurved selfbows offered little benefit over a longbow, which was easier and faster to make for similar function.
The second pattern is if they are deliberately depicting recurve bows (typically the shorter Asiatic recurves), and this would make more sense based on which part of Europe you are referencing. The German and Bohemian sources you referenced are from a period where there was plenty of interaction with Eastern European nomadic cultures (Tatars, Cumins Huns, etc.) who used these kinds of bows. The Frankish kingdoms clashed with Muslim kingdoms in Spain, and there was a Muslim presence in Italy. In fact, based on the names of the sources used ("The Destruction of Troy"), the artist may be attempting to depict the bows used by that culture.
However, as you mentioned, much of these illustrations are anachronisms pieced together by artists who combine contemporary equipment (harnesses, weapons, armour) with historical and mythical events. These illustrations themselves contain numerous errors (I talk about the issue in this video, including bows that are oversized or undersized, being too straight for a braced bow, and having curved bowstrings). The artist may have seen these bows somewhere or drawn an embellished version of what they think a bow would have looked like in the hands of an exotic archer, and other illustrators copied this trend, not too dissimilar to how modern film re-uses tropes with weapons because other films do. In the case of the later Italian Rennaissance paintings with more realism, the artist may have in their possession longbows and recurve bows that were present or traded through Italy. However, they might have lacked the knowledge of how to use the bow or even how to string it, which may explain the odd shapes of the bow when braced and at full draw.
What can be said with a bit more confidence is that the use of recurve bows was far more common in Eastern Europe, which was more influenced by incursions from steppe nomads, and the traditions continue today. There isn't much reference to recurve bows in Western Europe and England. The most definitive source we have from the era, Toxophilus by Roger Ascham (1545) is very descriptive on the (English) longbow, but makes no reference to any kind of recurve bow. We lack substantial sources from other parts of Western Europe to show whether or not recurve bows were commonly used outside of art, and as I said above, art is unreliable as a source due to the numerous errors and anachronisms present in a format that was generally not intended to portray fact.
