The 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel (printed by Anton Koberger) was one of the earliest illustrated printed encyclopedias and marked a major milestone in the history of printing, being "one of the most densely illustrated and technically advanced works of early printing, with woodcuts by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, while a young Albrecht Dürer trained in Wolgemut's workshop. In one particularly lavishly colored copy of the Chronicle, seen below, a set of four handwritten circular margin annotations (roundels) are seen with Roman numerals. While it is clear that the roundels represent dates relating to the World and to Christ (they begin with "anno" and either "mdi" or "xpi"), several experts who reviewed the page were unable to discern their meaning and thus their purpose had remained elusive. Given Gemini 3 Pro's heavy investment in visual understanding, we wanted to explore what insights it could offer that could help bring greater clarity to this mystery. It ended up solving the mystery entirely, richly incorporating the page contents to disambiguate and contextualize the roundels and reason through ambiguities and different possibilities to arrive at what would appear to be a highly plausible and fascinating explanation that they represent a previous owner's attempt to work through the conflicting date systems of the Greek Old Testament and Hebrew Bible to clarify the chronology of Abraham's birth.
While Gemini 3 Pro doesn't get things perfectly right (it misreads a few of the dates in the text which affects its precise date answers), the arguments it makes below are highly persuasive and represent the first plausible explanation of these margin annotations to date. It is incredible to think that LMM visual understanding has advanced to the point that Gemini 3 Pro could read 500-year-old handwritten abbreviated shorthand marginalia, go back and read the entire printed page and use the contents of the page to work through and disambiguate the meaning of the shorthand, then put all of that information together to come up with a final understanding that fit all of the puzzle pieces , all without any human assistance of any kind.
Below you can see the full two-page spread (click to zoom):
Here are zooms of each of the four roundels (click to zoom):
We simply uploaded these five images into Gemini 3 Pro with High Media Resolution and gave it the following prompt:
Attached are two pages from the Nuremberg Chronicle. At the bottom of the page a previous owner of the book drew four circles and wrote Latin text in them. It was probably written sometime from 1493 to 1600s for context. I've also attached zoomed up images of the four circles. For each of them, transcribe the Latin and translate into English and tell me its meaning and importance. They relate to the text in the page, so use the page text to decipher and contextualize them.
Below you can see its final answer, which cost just $0.026008:
Based on the images provided from the Nuremberg Chronicle (Folio XXII), here is the transcription, translation, and analysis of the four handwritten circles.
The annotator has created a "conversion table" to clarify the chronology of Abraham's birth. The Nuremberg Chronicle presents two conflicting dates for this event based on different textual authorities: the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) and the Hebrew Bible (the Masoretic text). The annotator has extracted these "Year of the World" (Anno Mundi) dates from the printed text and calculated the corresponding "Before Christ" dates.
Here is the breakdown from Left to Right (based on the wide shot of the bottom of the page).
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