New Developments in Commedia Research. The Commedia all'improvviso Pictures in the Corsini Manuscript: A New Reading
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The two-volume anonymous manuscript Raccolta di Scenari Piu scelti D’istrioni in Rome’s Biblioteca Corsiniana is one of the oldest scenari collections of the commedia all’improvviso, and the only one that is illustrated. Because each of its one hundred scenari is preceded by a hand-drawn, coloured title page illustration depicting actors on a perspective stage, international researchers have long identified the Corsini manuscript as a key document for European theatre history. The central question raised by these pictures concerns the extent to which they depict actual sets and actors of their time. Did their illustrators draw on their own knowledge of the theatre, or did they rely on iconographic borrowings? Detailed investigations into the relationship between the manuscript’s illustrations and text, and the illustration’s compositional strategies, distance this visual material from the literal reflection of stage practice many previous scholars hoped to identify in it. Separate examination of the fore- and background of the Corsini illustrations has the advantage of allowing access to two branches of iconographic tradition, those associated with courtly academic performances, and with the professional players. Uniquely, the composition of the watercolours merges these two traditions into one. By embedding commedia all’improvviso iconography into the Corsini manuscript as decorative ornament in its own right, these pictures raise the manuscript’s status as a whole to an exemplary paradigm of academic collecting activity.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
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".