T_260
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.26, day 119
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S4, Tanxi half-raw, 6-foot
- 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
- 78%
- Dark share
- 46%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 9, water stain 3
Older engine
- V7
- 4
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: 0.050 (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 heavy central slab with fluent satellite strokes and spatter. There is modest tonal banding and legible grey-under-black passes. The lower half is crowded. Ordinary overall, close to R2.”
The big central mass is a bulky slab with a curled right end. The top-left comma stroke and the lower-left arcs are fluent. The pale left wedge is stiff.
WEAKEST Central slab is bulky and rectangular
STRONGEST Top-left hooked stroke with dry-brush tail
Modulation is 0.050, just above flat. The stretched view shows a darker core band and grey bands inside the slab. The black core and the top-left stroke are fairly flat.
WEAKEST Central black core fairly uniform
STRONGEST Central slab's graded grey edges and banding
Grey wash passes sit under the central slab and the left wedge, with black strokes laid over them. Two or three passes can be read, but the black largely covers the greys.
WEAKEST Black core partly covers earlier grey
STRONGEST Grey wash under slab with black over it
The top-left hook and the faint right arc lead the eye around to the heavy central slab. The lower half is crowded with splatter. The empty paper at the top is partly shaped.
WEAKEST Dominant slab crowds the lower centre
STRONGEST Top-left hook leading toward the right arc
Crease and fold lines cross the slab interior in the stretched view. There are small stray blots at top left and left. No tide lines or blooms were found in the principal masses.
WEAKEST Crease lines visible inside central mass
STRONGEST Dry-brush tails on the lower-left arcs
3 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 3 distinct places, 12 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: 2 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 17 edge segments, 29% crisp, 53% soft or bloomed, 18% 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.
none namedThe 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.