Botticelli’s "The Birth of Venus" and the Visual Politics of Desirability
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project examines three contemporary re-creations of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, exploring how modern depictions of the same image and story return to and change Botticelli’s vision. I juxtapose the fifteenth-century painting with three contemporary re-creations: Larry Moss’ Birth of Venus in Arigami (2009), Lady Gaga’s Applause music video (2013), and David LaChapelle’s The Rebirth of Venus photograph (2019). Venus has timeless status as an icon of beauty and desirability, but she changes over time in art. The original was created during the eruption of humanistic culture in the Early Renaissance and had radical and controversial influence.[1] The Renaissance saw a rise in ideas about religion, politics, and science, that influenced artists to push the boundaries of representability by seeing the body for visual pleasure.[2] Due to the authority of the church, the nude or partially nude body was subject to censorship, and erasure. Many artworks, including some by Botticelli, were confiscated or destroyed because they were considered obscene.[3] Botticelli’s painting was a private commission as the subject matter was controversial. It hung above the bed of wealthy statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici.[4] Now the original is accessible in public space, as are re-creations of the original, as the politics of representability have changed. Censorship of the female body still exists, but the boundaries of nudity continue to be pushed and moved in art, and in public discourses about art. [1] “Renaissance Nude,” Getty Museum, Getty Publications, https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/renaissance_nude/inner.html. [2] Ibid [3] Ibid [4] (“Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance, Botticelli, PBS” 2023) “Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance., Botticelli,” PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), https://www.pbs.org/empires/medici/renaissance/botticelli.html
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.
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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| 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 it