T_208
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.12, day 105
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S12, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, half-raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P2 The Switch
- 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
- 5.5
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.6
- Ink cover
- 77%
- Dark share
- 45%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 8, water stain 5
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.
5 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: 0.040 (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
“This sheet is a single banded arc in the manner of R3, with less to it. The upper layering is legible, but the black is flat, the lower-left end is blunt and the arc crowds the sheet. It is ordinary overall.”
One great arc built from banded strokes; upper bands are fluent, but the lower-left black end is a blunt wedge and the right end loosens into dissolving grey.
WEAKEST Blunt dark slab end at lower left
STRONGEST Upper translucent arc bands following brush travel
Five tonal steps, with stepped greys and dry-brush streaks in the upper and right arc; the left black mass reads flat (modulation 0.040).
WEAKEST Flat black interior of left mass
STRONGEST Stepped grey bands along upper arc
Three or four arc passes stay legible as stepped bands at the top; underneath, the lower passes merge into a general grey, so the order is less clear.
WEAKEST Lower band where passes blur together
STRONGEST Stacked translucent bands along top edge
A single arc fills 77% of the sheet and gives clear movement, but the empty paper is mostly leftover margin and the lower-right end goes soft.
WEAKEST Crowded lower-right, little shaped paper
STRONGEST Sweeping arc carrying eye left to right
Ink is controlled and the spatter is deliberate. Paper creases cross the central dark and a slightly cloudy grey sits in the lower band; neither is a major disruption.
WEAKEST Crease lines crossing dark mass
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking in upper bands
5 distinct places, 1 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 5 distinct places, 13 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. A major flaw holds Material and surface at rung 1.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 27% crisp, 53% soft or bloomed, 20% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
5 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
2 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.6A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.5.
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.