Dispersal hunts the painted

Claim (verbatim)

Dispersal hunts the painted. That illustrated books survive preferentially is doctrine; the sharper, unestablished claim is that survival and integrity anticorrelate through the dealer's knife. Every painting is a separable asset, so the hazard of dismemberment grows with painting count, and the market leaves a dose-response signature: the manuscripts that survive most visibly are precisely the ones least likely to survive whole.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (the verdict follows it): among Shahnama Project manuscripts produced before 1600, the fraction now recorded as dispersed — folios held in three or more collections — is at least three times higher for manuscripts with 40 or more paintings than for those with 15 or fewer. Secondary clause: within dispersed manuscripts, painted folios are traced to current locations at at least twice the rate of text-only folios, because paintings were extracted and saved while text leaves were discarded or scattered untracked.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Cambridge Shahnama Project, which reconstructs dispersed manuscripts folio by folio with painting counts and present locations.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The dealer's dismemberment of illustrated Persian manuscripts is thoroughly documented -- the flagship is the Great Mongol ('Demotte') Shahnama, bought c.1910 by Georges Demotte and broken up leaf by leaf (even splitting two-sided folios) to sell paintings individually, so ~58 illustrations survive scattered while most text pages are lost -- and the 'every painting is a separable asset' mechanism the item names is standard (Smarthistory, 'Making and Mutilating Manuscripts of the Shahnama'). Not located: the item's dose-response test that carries the verdict -- the dispersed fraction being >= 3x higher for manuscripts with >= 40 paintings than for those with <= 15, and painted folios traced to current locations at >= 2x the rate of text folios within dispersed books -- computed over the Cambridge Shahnama Project's folio-level reconstructions. Phenomenon documented; the painting-count dose-response is unrun.

• Smarthistory, 'Making and mutilating manuscripts of the Shahnama' — Dealer dismemberment of illustrated Shahnamas; the Demotte case.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Folios from the Great Mongol Shahnama (Book of Kings)' — Demotte's leaf-by-leaf sale; ~58 surviving illustrations. The Cambridge Shahnama Project folio reconstructions are the kill dataset for the dose-response.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.