One Thousand and One Conjectures

Maya polychrome cylinders pose a closed-loop composition problem, and workshop painters solved it the way a tailor does: by giving the garment a seam and placing it at the back. Because these vessels were presented and used along a principal viewing axis…

The Primary Standard Sequence on Maya vases is a fixed dedicatory formula fitted onto rims of very different circumferences; if the band was planned like piecework lettering against available length, abbreviation should be hierarchical rather than ad hoc, dropping the same expendable…

Bestiary images descend copy by copy, but the copyist's eye corrects toward nature only where nature is available: a fox or hedgehog is re-anchored by daily perception, while a crocodile, whale, or bonnacon is pure graphic descent with no external referent. Iconographic…

Pattern sheets travelled as outline drawings with colour given verbally — the Göttingen Model Book literally writes out its recipes — while copying from a finished exemplar transmits paint by eye but forces a freehand redraw. Two transmission channels, opposite bandwidths: model-book…

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…

In Byzantium the coin was the fastest image medium the court controlled: dies were recut within months, while mosaics, ivories, and books ran on multi-year project cycles. Innovations in imperial iconography — new crown forms, loros arrangements, newly court-adopted Christ and Virgin…

Chrysography and gold-leaf image grounds drew on the same budget line, the same material stock, and the same specialist hours, and they address different audiences — the reader and the beholder. The naive luxury model says richer books have more of both;…

Byzantine book epigrams praising gold letters, silver covers, and purple leaves are conventionally read as rhetorical topoi. But the verses were commissioned as part of the same donation package as the decoration, and a donor recording a gift before God has audit…

Insular interlace obeys strict under-over alternation, and its rare violations are treated as random lapses. The conjecture: the slips are structural — they concentrate where the drawing process broke off, at panel joins, pigment-field boundaries, and day-work seams — so error positions…

Romanesque corbel tables read as carnivalesque miscellany, but carving proceeded bay by bay from scaffolds, one carver working consecutive blocks with whatever type he was fluent in that week. Subject types should therefore show strong serial autocorrelation around the eaves — runs…

Gothic Passion diptychs were serial products of Parisian workshops. If scene selection were devotionally bespoke, observed combinations would spread across the combinatorial space of available scenes; if workshop-standardized, they collapse into a few fixed menus, and menu identity should track workshop groups…

Ornament in stained glass — border types, diaper grounds, grisaille foliage — is studied inside glass scholarship, but glaziers stocked their cartoon chests from painters' books. Ornament families should therefore appear in dated manuscripts before dated glass of the same region, with…

The deluxe illuminated copy and the textually best copy of a work are systematically different books: illumination routes production through commercial ateliers optimizing appearance, schedule, and a lay patron's ear — smoothing hard readings as they go — while plain copies made…

Bas-de-page drolleries look like free invention scattered at whim, but the planner's and patron's attention concentrated at the liturgical divisions, where the opening had to perform. If marginal invention is budgeted attention rather than a programme, drollery density and inventiveness should decay…

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…

Sheets and scrolls of stamped Buddhas look like space-filling repetition, but the devotional act was arithmetic: vows specified counts. If the count, not the sheet, was the unit of work, totals should cluster at canonical numbers and their multiples, and completed items…

That Japanese handscroll action tends right-to-left is a specialist commonplace; the unestablished claim is the full mechanism test across cultures. If lateral bias comes from the reading technology — the image must hand the eye onward to the next scene — then…

Mixtec screenfold painters worked along red guide-lined boustrophedon registers laid out before painting. If composition ran on a short planning horizon, spacing should compress as the painter approaches each register turn — the same crowding-at-the-end signature papyrologists read in line justification —…

Whether Maya codex production divided glyphic and pictorial labour is unresolved. The conjecture: it did not — each glyphically identified scribal hand painted its own deity images, so a hand's iconographic micro-habits (the drawing of God B's eye, ear-ornament forms, foot rendering)…

At Dunhuang, painted banners and woodblock prints of the same deities circulated in the same decades. Prints from one matrix are identical trivially; the conjecture is cross-matrix: variance across different woodblocks of one deity should still be far below painted variance, because…