‘The illustration of all art expressed in objects of utility’: The formation of the Renaissance collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the formation of the collections of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European works of art at the Victoria and Albert Museum. For brevity’s sake, all are characterized here as ‘Renaissance’ objects, rather than by their century of production. During the first quarter-century of the museum’s activity, Renaissance art was a powerful conditioning influence on British culture and society. This encouraged the growth of the Renaissance collections between 1852 and 1875 at a rapid rate that has never since been equalled. The museum’s regularly published inventories of acquisitions include the prices paid for objects; since the purchasing power of the pound sterling altered little between 1854 and 1914, this permits an assessment of the relative value of acquisitions over this formative period. The paper closes with a résumé of the continued development of the collections since the First World War.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".