T_225
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
- 5.2
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.25
- Ink cover
- 83%
- Dark share
- 26%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 3, bloom 4, tide line 1, mud 1, other 2
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 4 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: 0.055 (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
“An energetic sheet of spatter and sweeps, close to R2. It has a working arc and legible greys, but the bottom-left is cloudy and crowded, and there are wash accidents next to the principal masses.”
The central dark arc and the right-hand fan of dry-brush strokes are coherent and follow the brush. The bottom-left dark area is diffuse and the top-left bar is stiff.
WEAKEST Diffuse grey cloud bottom-left lacks a clear wall
STRONGEST Central dark arc stroke rising to the right
There are five tonal steps and the dark-interior modulation is 0.055. The central arc shows grain and banding. The right dark blot and the top-left bar are fairly flat inside.
WEAKEST Dark blot at right centre is flat inside
STRONGEST Right fan of grey streaks with stepped density
Pale grey washes, mid-grey sweeps and dark strokes with spatter stay mostly legible. In the bottom-left the passes blur together into a cloudy mass.
WEAKEST Bottom-left overlaps get cloudy and harder to read
STRONGEST Pale grey arcs under the dark central stroke
A sweep carries the eye from lower left to upper right, and the paper at the top centre is shaped. Ink covers 83% of the sheet, which is busy, and the bottom-left is crowded with spatter.
WEAKEST Crowded, busy bottom-left quadrant
STRONGEST Sweeping arc from lower left up to the right
There is a milky, cloudy wash with blotchy texture across the left-centre greys and a soft grey bloom at the bottom-left. Pale tide-edged patches sit beside the right blot.
WEAKEST Cloudy grey wash patch at left centre
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks in the right fan
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, 11 mentions in all across 4 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: 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 20 edge segments, 60% crisp, 25% soft or bloomed, 15% 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 1.3A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
4 of 5 validV23 rating 5.2.
Engine v23.8, 4 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.