T_220
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.15, day 108
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S11, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, 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
- 5.3
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2.4
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1
- Ink cover
- 77%
- Dark share
- 27%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- tide line 6, water stain 6, bloom 2, other 4, mud 1
Older engine
- V7
- 6
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: 0.077 (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
“Two sound gestural strokes in a working diagonal composition. The dark right stroke is the best part. The cloudy, mottled background washes with tide edges muddy the space and pull material down, so the sheet sits near R2.”
Right vertical stroke curves cleanly with a rounded, bristled foot. The left grey sweep arcs coherently, but its upper-left end is bulky and blurred into wash.
WEAKEST Left sweep's ragged, washy upper-left end
STRONGEST Right dark curved stroke following brush travel
Modulation 0.077 and four tonal steps. Both strokes show bristle streaks and graded density, but the surrounding grey washes are cloudy and lifeless, so the range between them is thin.
WEAKEST Cloudy, flat pale background washes
STRONGEST Bristle-streaked gradation inside the right dark stroke
Pale washes go down first, then the grey sweep, then the black stroke. Each pass can still be read where they overlap, but the order does not build depth across the sheet.
WEAKEST Background washes merge into a vague, cloudy layer
STRONGEST Dark stroke laid clearly over grey washes
The left sweep and the right column arc toward each other and give the sheet a direction. The top centre is filled with mottled wash, so the empty paper loses its shape.
WEAKEST Busy, cloudy top-centre field between the strokes
STRONGEST Two converging diagonal arcs setting up movement
Mottled, tide-edged grey washes sit at the top centre and to the right of the black stroke, and are visible in the colour view. The background reads as cloudy, not chosen.
WEAKEST Mottled tide-edged washes beside the dark stroke
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking inside the right dark stroke
7 distinct places, 3 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 7 distinct places, 19 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), 7 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 14 edge segments, 36% crisp, 50% soft or bloomed, 14% 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.
4 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.3.
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.