For the Record: Muzio Costanzo, ‘Franciscus Etiopem’, and Paris Bordon’s <i>Portrait of a Man in Armour with Two Pages</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Metropolitan Museum’s Portrait of a Man in Armour with Two Pages, painted a sixteenth-century portrait by the Venetian artist Paris Bordone, has been of great interest to art and cultural historians studying the depiction of Black subjects in early modern portrait art, because it is the earliest known work to depict a Black page attending a White male subject. It influenced the development of a distinct European portrait type in which aristocratic white sitters were represented with enslaved Black attendants in which their unequal power relations underscored by the rigid hierarchies of their proximities. Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal observe that the result of this motif is ‘the paradoxical presence and erasure of the enslaved subject in portraiture’ as material subjects that are seen but not acknowledged. Such a voluntary ‘erasure’ of what is clearly present also applies to the ways we have read archival documents about enslaved people from the point of view of the colonizer. Here, I re-read both the painting and the documents to restore the identities of both the main soldier subject and his Black slave, Francisco of Ethiopia, by drawing attention to our encoded methods of reading racialized subjects in the gallery and in the archive.
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 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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".