Domínguez Torres, Mónica. Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The pearl has long numbered among the most prized of gems, as indicated by Roman historian Pliny the Elder's anecdotes regarding its great value in the ancient world.The marine gem continued to maintain its venerated status in early modern Europe, too, where it was worked into jewellery and clothing and celebrated in portraiture.Yet, the pearl's white, luminous surface belies a complex reality concerning questions of power, race, and labour in the early modern period, topics at the heart of Mónica Domínguez Torres's Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion.The pearl has become a popular subject as of late-Molly A. Warsh's American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) being a major recent contribution-but Pearls for the Crown steps away from its predecessors' focus on "extraction, circulation, and trade of the marine gems" (3).Instead, the book charts new ground in its analysis of pearl art and how these artifacts reflect and respond to the broader geopolitical and cultural circumstances of their creation.Pearls for the Crown is divided into five chapters, roughly organized in chronological order.Each illustrates a different facet of the pearl's identity in the early modern world by focusing on the relationship between a particular artwork and contemporary texts.In the fifteenth century, pearls were harvested from the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean; Christopher Columbus's discovery of pearling grounds off the coast of Venezuela in 1498 allowed the Spanish direct commercial access to the gem.Chapter 1 thus explores how Spain's growing control over the pearl trade-first via the Americas and later its rule over Portugal (1580-1640)-facilitated the association between the gem and Habsburg expansion, as well as the cult of the Immaculate Conception.Chapter 2 then focuses on the pearl as a subject of scientific and artistic inquiry in early modern Europe; often, princely collections of naturalia and artificialia invited comparisons between the pearl oyster and the frog, both of which fascinated contemporary viewers due to their perceived medicinal properties and reproductive mechanisms.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
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".