T_212
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
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1
- Ink cover
- 81%
- Dark share
- 40%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- ring 6, tide line 3, bloom 2, water stain 4, mud 1
Older engine
- V7
- 7
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: 0.052 (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 energetic double vortex close to R2. The left spiral is fluent, while the right mass is heavy and crowded. Drop rings and blooms in the pale left disc mark the surface. Tone and layering are ordinary.”
The left circular sweep has fluent, curved stroke walls. The right dark mass is heavy, with ragged lobes, and the bridging neck is clumsy.
WEAKEST right mass: bulky, slab-like dark block, top right
STRONGEST left spiral arcs following the brush's sweep
Modulation is 0.052, just above flat. The right mass shows grain and banding. The left crescent darks are mostly uniform. Five tonal steps.
WEAKEST dark crescent at the lower left is fairly flat inside
STRONGEST right mass: grainy, banded interior greys
Pale grey circular washes sit under the black arcs and stay readable at the left. On the right, later dark passes largely cover the earlier greys.
WEAKEST grey passes under the right mass are partly smothered
STRONGEST pale grey disc showing through the left spiral
Two linked vortices make a figure-eight flow, with paper shaped at the top centre and lower centre. Coverage of 0.81 crowds the sheet, and the right block is dense.
WEAKEST right mass is heavy and crowds the right edge
STRONGEST linked double vortex moving the eye from left to right
The left disc interior has many circular drop rings and milky blotches beside the dark arcs. There is a pale cloudy wash edge at the lower centre. Visible in the colour view.
WEAKEST drop rings and blooms inside the pale left disc
STRONGEST dry-brush grain in the right mass
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, 16 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), 4 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 18 edge segments, 39% crisp, 33% soft or bloomed, 28% 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.
5 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.0.
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.