AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary

The donor grows only in the West

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

The donor grows only in the West. Donor portraiture is one genre under two theologies of presence. Latin donation imagery kept renegotiating scale as lay patronage broadened and purgatorial accounting personalized the stakes; the Byzantine proskynesis format was liturgically frozen. The handbook impression that donors get bigger is not the claim — the claim is the divergence: a dated, monotone Latin growth curve with a specific crossing point, against a Byzantine flat line over the same centuries.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (the verdict follows it, requiring both arms): measured on at least 100 dated Latin and 50 dated Byzantine donor images, the Latin donor-to-holy-figure height ratio shows a positive secular trend whose decadal median crosses 0.85 between 1380 and 1440, while the Byzantine trend over 1100-1450 is statistically indistinguishable from zero, the median ratio staying within plus or minus 0.05 of its twelfth-century value.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Index of Medieval Art donor-image records with dates, measured on British Library, BnF, and e-codices digitizations.

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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

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

The Latin growth arm is handbook knowledge — donors moving from diminutive to three-quarter to equal scale by the 15th century — which the claim itself concedes; the dated two-arm divergence test with a specific crossing point against a flat Byzantine series is un-run.

'Donor portrait' (scale conventions and 15th-century parity)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

No community feedback yet.

Add your take

Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.