Ivories are set menus

Claim (verbatim)

Ivories are set menus. 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 more reliably than carving-style connoisseurship does — iconographic choice as the fingerprint, style as the noise.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (the verdict follows it): among two-register Passion diptychs in the Gothic Ivories database, the ten most frequent scene-set combinations account for at least 60 percent of objects, versus under 20 percent expected from independent draws matched to marginal scene frequencies. Secondary clause: menu clusters align with published workshop groupings significantly above chance.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Gothic Ivories Project database (Courtauld Institute), publicly searchable with scene-level cataloguing of every register.

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 serial standardization the item stakes is documented: large Parisian Passion diptychs were luxury serial products with 'multiple masters sharing the same iconographic models and employing them in various permutations and combinations', and Koechlin's Les Ivoires Gothiques Francais (1924) grouped the 'grands diptyques de la Passion' precisely by their recurring scene-set formulae. Not located: the item's operationalization -- that the ten most frequent scene-set combinations account for >= 60 percent of two-register Passion diptychs (versus under 20 percent from independent draws matched to marginal scene frequencies) and that menu clusters align with published workshop groupings above chance (iconographic choice as a better fingerprint than carving-style connoisseurship). Standardized menus documented; the concentration statistic and the menu-beats-style test are unrun.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Ivory Carving in the Gothic Era, Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries' (Passion diptychs; shared iconographic models in permutations) — Serial Parisian production; Koechlin's grands diptyques de la Passion and their recurring scene combinations.
• The Gothic Ivories Project (Courtauld Institute), scene-level cataloguing of every register — The kill dataset for the scene-set concentration and menu-vs-workshop-cluster test.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.