T_199
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
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.8
- Ink cover
- 66%
- Dark share
- 18%
- Tonal steps
- 3
- Flaws named by the reads
- tide line 4, bloom 5, other 2, water stain 1
Older engine
- V7
- 9
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: 0.044 (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
“A fluent striated arc balanced against a flat, bulky black slab. The left side is crowded and the pale washes there are cloudy. An ordinary sheet overall, close to R2.”
Upper arc's outline follows the stroke's travel. Lower-left curve holds its shape. The dark slab is a heavy rectangle ending in pooled blobs, and the left wedges are stiff.
WEAKEST Bottom-right dark slab, bulky with blobby finger ends
STRONGEST Great grey arc following the brush's sweep
Bristle banding and dry-brush speckle model the arc and the left greys. The measured modulation of the bottom-right black mass is under the flat threshold. Three tonal steps.
WEAKEST Dark slab interior flat, modulation 0.044
STRONGEST Striated grey arc with bristle banding
Three passes: pale arc, mid-grey left wedges and curve, black slab. Overlaps at upper left stay readable but get busy. The black slab sits mostly alone.
WEAKEST Left cluster where grey passes crowd together
STRONGEST Pale arc passing under darker left strokes
The arc carries the eye from upper left to the black slab at lower right, and the empty paper inside the arc is shaped. The left third is cluttered and its pale passes are weak.
WEAKEST Crowded, fussy left edge cluster
STRONGEST Sweeping arc enclosing shaped white space
The dry-brush grain in the arc is used well. At bottom left, a pale cloudy wash with ringed edges sits beside the curved stroke. Pooled blobs at the slab ends. Scattered spatter.
WEAKEST Cloudy, tide-edged pale wash at bottom left
STRONGEST Dry-brush striations used across the arc
6 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 6 distinct places, 12 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: 4 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 4 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 9 edge segments, 11% crisp, 78% soft or bloomed, 11% 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.