The Paradox of Shape: On the Representation of Women in the Sixteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the third part of his Dialogus de viris et foeminis aetate nostra florentibus, Paolo Giovio lists over one hundred illustrious women of his time and paints an unusual picture of Italian society. The catalogue is not a review of the virtues or superiority of women but rather an account of the political use of female representations. Women are associated with the political status of a city, and all references to the physicality of women illustrate the paradox of politics itself. The female body is used as a test case to examine the exercise of power and to demonstrate the reasons for different political strategies in different courts before the dramatic Sack of Rome in 1527. Through an analysis of the Dialogus and comparison with other contemporary treatises on female figures, this article highlights the political use of the female shape, described and paradoxically modified, according to government strategy. A salient example is the ambiguous representation of Vittoria Colonna, seen by Paolo Giovio as the model for women in the Renaissance.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".