“Lest we be shamed”: Italian Renaissance Taste for Textile Ensembles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the second half of the fifteenth century, lavish displays of luxurious textile ensembles became obligatory on grand occasions in Italian courts and city states. Such displays demonstrated the political and cultural power of persons, families, and governments. Among the courts of northern Italy, competition was so keen that rulers and their spouses personally took charge of new purchases, and temporary loans from family and friends. Voluminous correspondence documents the quantities and qualities calibrated to the occasion. For example, in 1468, Duchess Bianca Maria Sforza of Milan assembled the hangings for the wedding of her son Galeazzo Maria at the family castle in Pavia. The platform for honored guests in front of the castle had to be completely covered, and the ducal barge and towns through which the family and guests would pass had to be richly decorated, in the duchess’s words, “lest we be shamed.” In 1506, Elisabetta Gonzaga della Rovere, Duchess of Urbino, asked her sister-in-law, Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, Marquise of Mantua, to loan furnishings for Pope Julius II’s second visit like those sent in 1505 for his first: bed-hangings of silk and cloth-of-gold, carpets for the table and floor of his bedroom, canopies, and other things “to satisfy our honor as much as possible.” Isabella replied that she could only send two bed-sets of gold brocade and damask since she needed the rest to honor the pope’s retinue of cardinals. I will outline how the taste for ensembles of wallhangings, curtains, and carpets represented by Mantegna in the Gonzaga’s castle in Mantua between 1465 and 1474 evolved, and how it affected and was influenced by trade, production, and aesthetics.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
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".