The Origins and Agency of the Miraculous Annunciation at the Santissima Annunziata in Counter-Reformation Florence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on miracle-working images has shown that devotees attributed their power to the authentic likeness of the holy people these images possessed. An authentic likenss of Christ, for instance, possessed his seemingly infinite agency. Using the miraculous painting of the Annunciation at the Santissima (SS.) Annunziata in Florence as a case study, this article questions whether an image’s agency was indeed limitless. Based on an examination of various hagiographical writings on the shrine written during the Counter-Reformation period, in particular Angelo Lottini’s Scelta d’alcuni miracoli e grazie della Santissima Nunziata di Firenze, this article proposes that certain miracles were connected with the image’s origins. In light of James Frazer’s theory of sympathetic magic, and Alfred Gell’s more recent theory of art and agency, this article argues that these post-Tridentine writings define the Annunziata image’s agency by the circumstances of its origins, which made it especially (though not exclusively) powerful over problems relating directly or conceptually to the mind, imagination, and eyes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".