Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the philosophical concept of the sublime and its impact in the work of the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The main focus of the paper is Piranesi’s Carceri series, created during the period of 1740 – 1760 in Rome. Although Dionysius Longinus wrote of the sublime several centuries earlier, this concept became popular in 18th century aesthetic theory, and Piranesi had access to the writings of Longinus and 18th-century followers of his ideas. According to Longinus’ theory, creating a sublime work of art required daring and great thinking. The sublime was a quality of experience meant to move the soul to a higher realm. Piranesi attempted to emulate this quality in his own works by invoking the grandeur of ancient Rome. Piranesi was surrounded by ancient ruins and he was actively involved in archaeological digs. He wrote on the wonder of observing the ruins of Rome, “these speaking ruins have filled my spirit”. At the same time, Piranesi was not only surrounded by classical concepts; the motif of the gothic arch, which conveys the idea of architecture reaching up to heaven, also plays a role in his prints and their evocation of the sublime. His techniques with etching, composition, and depiction of light show his creativity, skill, and ambition, consistent with Longinus’ ideas. The iconography of the Carceri prints, especially Plates XIII, XIV, XVI, expresses Piranesi’s interest in the sublime through imaginative compositions, relating tiny figures to lofty architectural spaces, and through his demonstrated pride in ancient Rome.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".