T_164
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.03, day 96
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S4, Tanxi half-raw, 6-foot
- 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
- 7.2
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2.6
- Layering
- 2.4
- Composition
- 2.6
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 74%
- Dark share
- 42%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 4, other 8, tide line 2
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.
4 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: 0.055 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 2 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
“A strong crescent composition with a shaped void and readable grey under-washes. The marks are good but uneven: the lower-left masses are slab-like and flatter, and there are minor pale water marks near the top. Overall above R2 but well short of R3.”
Main crescent follows brush travel from left round to right arm; lower band and bottom-left fragments are slab-like and broken, with clumsy joins.
WEAKEST Bulky grey-black slab along the lower left band
STRONGEST Rising dark right arm of the crescent
Right arm and centre band show streaks, grain and dry-brush banding; lower-left dark wedge and bottom-centre dark are flatter. Modulation 0.055, four tonal steps.
WEAKEST Dark lower-left band, fairly even inside
STRONGEST Grained, spotted right arm with streaked interior
Translucent grey arcs and top-left panels sit under the black crescent and stay readable; only two or three passes, and the order is not built across the sheet.
WEAKEST Bottom-left overlaps are cluttered and fragmentary
STRONGEST Pale grey arc washes under the dark crescent
A large crescent carries the eye from upper left, down, then up the right arm to the spatter; the open top centre is shaped by the arc. The bottom-left corner is busy.
WEAKEST Fragmented bottom-left corner marks
STRONGEST Sweeping crescent enclosing shaped empty top centre
Ink is controlled, with dry-brush grain in the central band. Faint pale wash drops and stains in the top centre and top right, and a small white chip at the bottom edge, lie away from the main masses.
WEAKEST Pale watery drip trails in the upper centre
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking in the central band
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, 14 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), 7 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 20% crisp, 73% soft or bloomed, 7% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
4 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
none namedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 2.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 7.2.
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.