Rape or Rapaciousness in Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen’s Tunis Tapestries?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Court artist Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen produced a set of cartoons for the Tunis tapestries commissioned by Mary of Hungary and woven in Brussels in c. 1546–54. Throughout the ten extant cartoons, women are subjected to violence, but they are also presented as economically valuable captives and slaves. In the sole surviving preparatory drawing, Vermeyen recorded more extreme physical depredation, with the corpse of a young, obese woman lying on her side with her garments pulled up to expose her pubic mound and her upper left arm sliced open in two places. The violated woman rendered the rapaciousness of soldiers an inescapable fact. In addition, viewers may have associated the victim with the North African practice of bride fattening. However, this disturbing figure was eliminated from the final tapestries. While we lack direct testimony about that decision, it may have been informed by a combination of sexual, ethnographic, and medical discourses.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".