MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W7008996798

Cross Fragment with the Mother of God

2020· article· en· W7008996798 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueDigital Kenyon (Kenyon College) · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicByzantine Studies and History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTSG101ParaphernaliaCircumstantial evidenceFusible alloySubpoena
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This cross fragment features an inscription reading ΜΗΡΘV (Μήτηρ Θεοῦ), Greek for "Mother of God". Below the inscription is a carving of the Virgin Mary, centered on the cross with her arms outstretched. The Virgin in an orant, or praying position, was intended to intercede for the owner, offering divine mediation. The cross has suffered considerable damage. The lower arm is now lost; three of the finial discs appear to have been broken off, and the outer edges of each of the three remaining arms have jagged grooves. At some point, a repair was made to the cross. The fragmented lower arm was reattached to the upper half of the cross by a plate mounted by two anchors. This cross may have been used in processions. Byzantine churches often had several types of processional crosses that were held by the clergy during ceremonies. Some processional crosses were also left as votive offerings and found in small, private religious foundations. Since our cross is small, made of a comparatively inexpensive material, not heavily adorned, and made from a mold, it could have been an object that was accessible to many people of any social standing. A larger, gilded processional cross, now at the Royal Ontario Museum (no. 994.220.11), features similar Virgin Mary iconography. While this cross is of higher quality and the inscription shows the personalization that the Byzantines gave their votive crosses, our cross fragment was no less personal or cared for. The repair to the cross suggests it had a long life with many owners who each bestowed the cross with different meanings, and required of it different intent. Setting aside any modern notions of quality of aesthetics, we are able to see in these repairs what a mass-produced cross such as this can tell us about human engagement with it. Sources Consulted John A. Cotsonis, Byzantine Figural Processional Crosses (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1994). Helen C. Evans, and William D. Wixom, eds., The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843-1261 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997). Liz James, “Senses and Sensibility in Byzantium,” Art History 27 (2004): 522–537. Anna Kartsonis, “The Responding Icon,” in Heaven on Earth: Art and the Church in Byzantium, ed. Linda Safran (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). 58–80. Asen Kirin, ed. Sacred Art, Secular Context: Objects of Art from the Byzantine Collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC (Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005). Eunice Dauterman Maguire, Henry Maguire, and Maggie J. Duncan-Flowers, Art and Holy Powers in the Early Christian House (Urbana: Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1989). Karen Sonik, “Pictorial Mythology and Narrative in the Ancient Near East,” in Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, eds. Brian A. Brown, and Marian H. Feldman (Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 265–293. Catalina Mendivil ('24) for ARHS 110 Introduction to Western Art (Spring 2021).

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.854
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.194
Teacher spread0.176 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it