From the Chapel to the Gallery: The Aestheticization of Altarpieces in Early Modern Italy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the aesthetic response to altarpieces in early modern Italy, which culminated in the reconstitution of altarpieces as gallery paintings, when, beginning in the seventeenth century, wealthy collectors began removing them from churches and displaying them in their private collections. Such a transformation not only entailed a complete rupture in the function of these paintings – from object of public veneration to private delectation – but also frequently met with resistance and censure from local authorities. It is precisely because it was a very difficult thing to do that the documents concerning the removal of altarpieces are frequently revealing about contemporary attitudes toward art among collectors as well as ecclesiastics. \nIn order to understand the mechanisms – both theoretical and practical –that had to be in place for such a transformation to occur, I explore the history of the altarpiece from the rise of ius patronatus as an economically motivated form of piety in late-medieval Italy, through the encroachment of artistic criteria such as invention and difficulty in the making and viewing of religious art in the sixteenth century, and, finally, to the post-Tridentine discourse on sacred images. Because the purpose of this study is to establish the church as a venue for a nascent connoisseurial discourse, I also consider the development of art collecting in Italy, which was circumscribed in extent through most of the sixteenth century. Lastly, I provide a comprehensive overview of the removal of altarpieces in seventeenth-century Italy, a phenomenon that has previously received only scant attention in art historical literature.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".