T_251
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.21, day 114
- Size
- 70 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S3, Tanxi Jing Pi, raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P2 The Switch
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SHP: save, has potential (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 6.8
- Form
- 2.2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 3
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 72%
- Dark share
- 52%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- bloom 6, other 4
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: 0.054 (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 strong sweeping bowl composition with legible pale, mid and dark passes. The bulky, largely flat black mass at the right holds back form and tone. The surface is mostly sound, with minor rim mottling.”
The main arc follows the brush's travel and its walls hold, with grooves tracking it. The right-hand black mass is slab-like and lobed at the top edge, not shaped by a stroke.
WEAKEST Bulky, lobed dark mass at right edge
STRONGEST Sweeping bowl arc with parallel groove lines
Modulation 0.054. The bottom of the bowl shows streaks, grain and arcs. The left arm grades from grey to dark. The top of the right mass reads as near-uniform black.
WEAKEST Upper right black mass largely flat
STRONGEST Bottom band with streaks, grooves and graded greys
There are three passes: the pale arc, the mid-grey sweep and the black pass. They stay legible on the left and at the top. On the right the black largely covers what lies beneath.
WEAKEST Dark right mass covers earlier passes
STRONGEST Pale grey arc in the top centre over mid-grey left arm
One continuous sweep carries the eye from top left down through the bowl to the right. The empty upper centre is a shaped void that works with the ink. The weight on the right presses against the edge.
WEAKEST Right edge heavy and crowded by black mass
STRONGEST Bowl arc framing the empty upper-centre paper
The ink is controlled and the groove lines are crisp. There is mottled, cloudy granulation along the inner rim at the centre and some drips at the top right. All are minor, and none is a large stain.
WEAKEST Cloudy, mottled fringe along the inner rim of the bowl
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks and grooves in the bottom band
4 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 4 distinct places, 10 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: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 5 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 7% crisp, 67% soft or bloomed, 27% 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.
none namedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 2.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 6.8.
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.