T_154
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
- 5.5
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.6
- Ink cover
- 63%
- Dark share
- 39%
- Tonal steps
- 3
- Flaws named by the reads
- tide line 2, bloom 5, other 5, dead ink 1
Older engine
- V7
- 8
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.
3 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: 0.052 (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
“Valley composition with masses rising from both corners around an open, spattered centre. Right arc strokes are fluent, but the bottom blacks are heavy and flat, and mottled tide blotches mark the left grey strokes.”
Right arc strokes follow brush travel; left diagonal grey strokes hold; bottom dark masses are heavy, lumpy slabs with blobby dabbed edges at left-centre.
WEAKEST Bulky dark slab along bottom centre-right
STRONGEST Sweeping curved strokes rising at right
Grey strokes show streaks and graded density; bottom dark masses mostly uniform black; modulation 0.052 only just above flat; three tonal steps.
WEAKEST Bottom right dark mass nearly flat inside
STRONGEST Left diagonal grey strokes with streaked grain
Pale grey washes, mid-grey strokes and black passes read separately at left and right; at the bottom the black largely buries what lies beneath.
WEAKEST Bottom blacks cover earlier greys
STRONGEST Pale grey washes under dark strokes left
Two masses rise from the corners into a U-shaped arc around shaped empty paper, with spatter leading inward; the bottom edge is congested and heavy.
WEAKEST Heavy, crowded bottom band
STRONGEST Valley arc framing open central sky
Top-left grey stroke and left dark dabs show blotchy rings and tide edges visible in colour view; there is also a gold object at the bottom-right edge.
WEAKEST Mottled tide-ringed grey stroke top-left
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks in right arc strokes
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, 13 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: 2 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 7 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 53% crisp, 33% soft or bloomed, 13% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
3 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
none namedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.6A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.5.
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.