T_150
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.03.27, day 89
- Size
- 70 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S3, Tanxi Jing Pi, raw
- Inks
- MB1, MB2, MB3
- Phase
- P1 Warm-up
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SA: save, archive (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 5.7
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.8
- Ink cover
- 79%
- Dark share
- 46%
- Tonal steps
- 6
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 4, overwork 1, other 4, bloom 2
Older engine
- V7
- 3
How the number was made
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.8, on 2026.10.06: measured by code, then read 5 times by Claude Opus 5.5 against three reference paintings (R1 to R3), each read independent of the others. How the engine works.
Three views of one sheet.
Left, the photograph. Centre, the tone stretch the model is shown beside it: the darkest 45% of tones spread over the whole range, so flat black, banding and stains show. Right, every pixel as the measuring code classes it: cyan black ink, deep teal translucent grey, stone the palest ink, near black bare paper.
6 families of tone.
Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Life inside the black: 0.046 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 4 of 5 qualities.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps. Where reads differ, they differ by one rung; close calls resolve down.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“An energetic, gestural sheet like R2: a fluent crescent and a heavy, modelled right mass in a sweeping arc. The bulk, the crowded centre and the partly flat darks keep it ordinary across all five ladders.”
Top-left crescent holds a fluent arc; large right mass is a broad, bulky lobe ending in a drip point; lower-left strokes are fragmented.
WEAKEST Large right dark mass is bulky, lobed outline
STRONGEST Upper-left black crescent stroke with dry-brush tail
Tone-stretched view shows stepped density and brush arcs inside the right mass; crescent is flat; modulation 0.046 is just above the flat threshold.
WEAKEST Upper-left crescent nearly flat black inside
STRONGEST Right mass with stepped greys and darker sub-shapes
Pale grey arcs, mid-grey wash and darker overlay in the right mass remain legible; centre spatter partly obscures pass order.
WEAKEST Centre overlap of mass with spatter gets busy
STRONGEST Grey sweep under darker right mass, readable overlap
Circular movement from top-left crescent to the heavy right mass gives direction; ink covers 79%, so empty paper is squeezed and the centre is cluttered.
WEAKEST Crowded centre spatter zone between the two masses
STRONGEST Sweeping arc from crescent into right mass
Ink is controlled; splashes look intended; the right mass shows faint patchy pale areas in the stretched view, though there is no clear tide line at viewing distance.
WEAKEST Cloudy uneven grey interiors in the right mass
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks at the crescent tail and lower arcs
4 distinct places, 0 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 4 distinct places, 11 mentions in all across 5 reads; the number in each ninth is how many times a flaw was named there. Reads agreeing on a place strengthen the evidence for one flaw; they do not multiply it.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 8 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 17 edge segments, 41% crisp, 24% soft or bloomed, 35% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
6 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
none namedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.8A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.7.
Engine v23.8, 5 reads. Fixed arithmetic, the same for every painting; the constants were set on 24 randomly chosen paintings so the median sheet scores 5. The scale is relative to this archive, not to painting in general, and a difference of less than half a point between two paintings is noise.