Pilliod, Elizabeth. Pontormo at San Lorenzo: The Making and Meaning of a Lost Renaissance Masterpiece
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elizabeth Pilliod's Pontormo at San Lorenzo offers an exhaustive catalogue of extant records and a new interpretation of Jacopo da Pontormo's lost frescoes for the Florentine cathedral of San Lorenzo.Duke Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned the frescoes for the Medici family's ancestral parish church, particularly the walls of the choir, in, probably, 1542 or 1543.Pontormo's rival, Giorgio Vasari, disparaged the work in his influential Lives of the Artists.Then, Pontormo's frescoes were destroyed in 1738 leaving later evaluations to often repeat Vasari's negative appraisals.Pilliod seeks to recover and recuperate Pontormo's important, lost work.The book is organized around an introduction, five chapters, and an extensive document register.In the introduction, Pilliod contrasts the early modern reception of Pontormo's fresco cycle with Michelangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel.Both works received criticism in their own day, but historiographical trends away from inherited prejudices against latter sixteenth-century art have benefited Michelangelo's later work.By contrast, critics have continued to view Pontormo's lost frescoes through the skewed prism of Vasari's extended critiques.In chapter 1, Pilliod shows how period documentation often contradicts Vasari's critical stories about the frescoes.Vasari had claimed that Pontormo locked away his work site in the choir of San Lorenzo and thus prevented anyone from seeing his work in progress.Pilliod, by contrast, reveals the regular participation of the Medici family in the commission and that Pontormo was working in a busy area of San Lorenzo that had people constantly coming and going to, from, and through the worksite.She reveals an earlier commission date for the frescoes than had previously been known and how frequent events would have forced Pontormo to temporarily stop work.Along the way, Pilliod systematically demonstrates how Pontormo approached the frescoes, charting his initial presentation of the work to the duke, through the construction of scaffolding, to the sheer range of activity that would have occurred as Pontormo and his workshop toiled away at the paintings.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.004 |
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".