T_196
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
- 5.8
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 53%
- Dark share
- 21%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 7, water stain 4
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: 0.047 (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
“A gestural sheet close to R2. A fluent dry-brush grey arc and crescent play against blunt, flat black slabs. The layering is legible and the composition works. Small creases and milky patches keep it ordinary.”
The big grey arc and the bottom-right crescent follow the stroke well. The right black slab and the bottom-left blob are bulky, stiff fills.
WEAKEST Right vertical black slab, blunt and filled-in
STRONGEST Large grey arc following the brush's sweep
The arc has striated grain and the centre has stippled, stepped density. The right and bottom-left black masses are uniform inside; modulation 0.047 is barely above flat.
WEAKEST Right vertical black slab, flat inside
STRONGEST Dry-brush banding inside the grey arc
A grey arc pass, a grey crescent and black gestural marks over them. The overlaps stay legible, but there are only about two passes and no built depth.
WEAKEST Black slabs simply sit over the grey
STRONGEST Black flecks over the grey arc at centre-left
The arc and the lower crescent make a strong countermovement around shaped white at the centre-right. The bottom-left figure and the left spatter feel detached.
WEAKEST Isolated bottom-left black figure and spatter
STRONGEST Sweeping arc carrying the eye left to right
The dry-brush grain is used well in the arc. Fold or crack lines cross the centre, and pale milky streaks sit inside the bottom-right grey mass. They are small but visible.
WEAKEST Crease lines and milky patches in lower crescent
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain shaping the grey arc
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: 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 19 edge segments, 42% crisp, 11% soft or bloomed, 47% 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.