T_172
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
- S11, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, 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
- 5.8
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 57%
- Dark share
- 50%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 9, water stain 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.
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: 0.057 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, one answer.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“An ordinary, gestural sheet. A strong arc and modelled dark mass on the right, but a blunt, flat wedge at top left and a scattered empty field with stray blots keep it average.”
The central grey arc tapers fluently and the dark thrust has energy. The top-left slab and the right-edge dark mass are bulky and filled in.
WEAKEST Blunt dark wedge slab at top left
STRONGEST Grey sweeping arc tapering to a point at centre
Modulation is 0.057 with four steps. The right mass shows grain and arcs inside. The top-left wedge is mostly flat, showing only faint texture in the stretched view.
WEAKEST Top-left dark wedge is fairly uniform inside
STRONGEST Right dark mass with grain, stepped greys and arcs
At right-centre the translucent grey arc and panels sit under the black thrust and the overlaps stay readable. Elsewhere passes mostly cover each other.
WEAKEST Top-left slab is a single pass
STRONGEST Grey arc under the dark thrust, right-centre
The heavy right side and the curving arc set a direction. The left wedge is isolated, and the large lower-left paper with stray drips feels partly leftover.
WEAKEST Scattered spatter in the empty lower-left field
STRONGEST Arc sweeping from centre into the right mass
The ink is controlled overall. Small drips and a grey smudge sit in the empty lower left, away from the principal masses. No tide lines are visible inside the darks.
WEAKEST Stray blots and smudge at bottom left
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks and splash edges at right
3 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 3 distinct places, 10 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), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 13 edge segments, 62% crisp, 23% soft or bloomed, 15% 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 5.8.
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.