Transmissive properties of Medieval and Renaissance stained glass in European churches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medieval stained glass is often described by how its clarity contributes to the lightness or darkness of a sacred interior. Using high dynamic range (HDR) imagery (a low-budget, time-efficient means of photographic data collection) to estimate luminances (or per-pixel brightnesses), the relative transmissivities of adjacent panels of glass are obtained for the first time in a variety of medieval churches in western Europe. In order to carry out a comparison between different interiors, red glass was assumed to have a fixed average transmissivity, based on data that suggest that the glazing transmission of red panes is relatively constant. This red standard was then applied over a large database of images collected from different churches to provide a quantitative index of stained glass light transmission. The results indicate that the use of brighter colours during the 12th century admitted more light compared to 13th-century glass. Furthermore, the more translucent glasses of the 15th and 16th centuries appear to have increased light transmission into the interior by as much as an order of magnitude. The resulting change in indoor illumination significantly altered the human visual perception of the sacred interior as glazing preferences evolved over the course of the late Middle Ages.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".