AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Emperors arrive in profile
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
Emperors arrive in profile. Medieval painters had almost no access to antique painting or free-standing portrait sculpture, but Roman coins passed through their world by the thousand. If coinage was the operative model medium for picturing antiquity, ancient rulers should be drawn in strict numismatic profile at rates far above contemporary rulers in the same books, who follow seal and majesty conventions toward frontal and three-quarter poses. Pose statistics thus encode which medium carried the past.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (the verdict follows it): in images dated 1100-1450, depictions of pre-Christian Roman emperors are in profile in at least 40 percent of cases, versus at most 10 percent for depictions of contemporary kings in the same manuscripts and genres — a fourfold or greater ratio. Secondary clause: the ancient-ruler profile fraction rises further in Italian manuscripts after 1300, tracking antiquarian coin collecting, while Parisian production shows no comparable rise.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Index of Medieval Art (Princeton) subject-indexed records for ruler imagery, cross-checked against the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts and BnF Mandragore.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries); 278-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w05_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W05 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. A platform output-limit resume occurred before the single Write; no additional tool calls or information ingress occurred.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Roman coins as the operative model medium for picturing antique rulers in the medieval West is recognized (e.g., Frederick II's augustales consciously reviving numismatic profile), anticipating the direction; the comparative pose-rate statistics against contemporary rulers are un-run.
Predictions
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