T_193
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.08, day 101
- 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
- 5.7
- Form
- 1.8
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 67%
- Dark share
- 26%
- Tonal steps
- 3
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 4, bloom 4, 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.
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: 0.049 (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 close to R2. The grey arcs are fluent, but the principal black masses are blobby and fairly flat. The layering reads, though without depth. The lower left is weak, and the surface is mostly sound.”
The grey arcs follow the brush, but the top-left black mass and the top-right mass have bulky, lobed edges. The lower-right wedge is a stiff slab.
WEAKEST Top-left black mass: lobed blob without a stroke path
STRONGEST Grey sweeping arc strokes across the centre
Interior modulation of 0.049 is only just above flat. The lower-right wedge and grey arcs show grain and streaks. The top-left black is mostly uniform inside.
WEAKEST Top-left black mass: nearly flat inside
STRONGEST Lower-right wedge with grained grey interior
There are grey arc washes, a black-mass pass and spatter. The overlaps at the right stay readable, but the passes do not build ordered depth.
WEAKEST Black masses cover the grey passes beneath them
STRONGEST Translucent grey arcs under the right-hand black masses
A swirling arc carries the eye from the top-left mass to the right cluster. The lower left is leftover paper with scattered spatter, and the right side feels crowded.
WEAKEST Lower-left quarter: empty paper and scattered spatter
STRONGEST Sweeping arc linking the left and right dark masses
The ink is generally controlled and the dry-brush streaks are used well. There are small brownish specks on the lower left and fuzzy, bled drops at the bottom centre. Neither sits in a principal mass.
WEAKEST Blurred, soft-edged drops at bottom centre
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking in the right-hand grey 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, 9 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: 3 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 8 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 18 edge segments, 39% crisp, 22% soft or bloomed, 39% 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 1.8A 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.