Suthor, Nicola. Bravura: Virtuosity and Ambition in Early Modern European Painting.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The choice of the subject and the original critical perspective in this thoroughly researched book are bound to leave a deep imprint on art history criticism, and hopefully will influence early modern literary study as well, because of a new critical viewpoint on the technique and result of composition.This pioneering book-about the delicate complexity of the craft and technology of painting which made Renaissance visual arts captivatingly intelligent and endlessly intriguing-moves away from the study of connoisseurship and instead analyzes a specific strategy, or a rhetoric, of artistic composition.This edition is a substantially revised and "supplemented English-language" (240) version of a study originally published in German.Nicola Suthor extends this focus on a property of art internal to the technology of artistic execution, and the effect it has on the viewer, in a significantly new direction and explores a compelling new topic.An equally sensitive reader of art theory and of painting, Suthor had already established a critical interest in the mechanics of artistic authenticity and their result, demonstrated brilliantly in her previous book, Rembrandt's Roughness (Princeton, 2018).In her new book, she has produced a comprehensive and original modern analysis of bravura, weaving together, in ten substantial chapters organized according to topic and concept, theoretical writing about and practical evidence of bravura.The book begins in early sixteenth-century Italy and ends by considering Picasso's and Braque's views on the impact and appearance of bravura as a painterly affectation.The opening chapter introduces the book's theoretical concepts and establishes the grounds for the definition of bravura.But theories and definitions of bravura continue to develop and transform throughout this book, as individual paintings reveal nuances, and new meanings and uses, of bravura.Bravura is a "painterly style" (1), but it is also the intent created by a technology employed in achieving style, and the effect that style produces on the viewer.This style, however, is not the result of a consonance between "effect and matter" (1) but the energy and dynamism of the artistic gesture that produced style.Furthermore, bravura is a contrived and a "pretended" (9) negligence that shows how "attitude becomes form" (9).As such, bravura
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".