Concept of Fortuna in the Collection of Biographies «De Casibus Virorum Illustrium» by Giovanni Boccaccio
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cult of the goddess Fortune dates back to ancient tradition. In the Middle Ages the allegorical image of Fortune remains popular in literature and everyday life. Authors such as Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio used in their works the allegorical image of Fortune, which has special verbal and visual characteristics. The main attention in this paper is focused specifically on the study of Fortune symbolism in the collection of biographies «De Casibus Virorum Illustrium» by G. Boccaccio. In the preface to the collection the humanist outlined the task he set for himself. It consisted in depicting the misfortunes, difficult and fatal fates of legendary and famous figures in history from Adam and Eve to the writer Fr. Petrarch he was contemporary with. In the biographies it is constantly emphasized that Fortune can be unpredictable. The text of «De Casibus Virorum Illustrium» is full of negative characteristics of Fortune, which repeatedly emphasize her fickleness and treachery. The visual representation of Fortuna also has negative connotations, which creates a formidable halo around the allegorical figure. In G. Boccaccio’s description, Fortune appears as a tall woman with a stern look and a gloomy face. On miniatures of the 15th century the goddess is depicted with closed eyes, wings (sometimes multi-armed), a staff, the Wheel of Fortune (Rota Fortunae) or a ship’s rudder. It is important that the characteristics of the humanist do not include the attributes of the goddess of fate. They appear later on miniatures for translations of G. Boccaccio works, which indicates the process of formation of iconographic tradition around the image of Fortune (by the 15th century the Wheel became its main attribute). The collection «De Casibus Virorum Illustrium» was supposed to serve as a warning about the changeability of fate for influential contemporaries of G. Boccaccio and subsequent generations. In the system of that time ideas, following the cardinal virtues of Christian theology (prudence, justice, courage, temperance) guaranteed the favor of Fortune.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".