T_276
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.05.07, day 130
- 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
- 6
- Form
- 3
- Tonal depth
- 2.2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1
- Ink cover
- 80%
- Dark share
- 34%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- tide line 3, water stain 3, other 8, bloom 2
Older engine
- V7
- 9
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: 0.050 (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 single fluent arc built from three concentric passes, with an open white centre. The dark core is mostly flat, the passes stack rather than layer, and a blotched pooled end at the bottom right damages the surface.”
One great arc whose outline and bristle striations follow the brush's path; the inner and outer edges hold. The right terminal is squared but not clumsy.
WEAKEST Blunt cut-off right end of dark arc
STRONGEST Sweeping dark arc with bristle tracks following travel
Outer grey bands step and streak; dark arc shows striations at lower left and right. The upper core is near-flat, and modulation of 0.050 is barely above the flat threshold.
WEAKEST Upper core of dark arc, nearly uniform
STRONGEST Graded grey outer bands with dry-brush streaks
Three concentric passes (pale halo, mid grey, dark core) can be read as overlapping bands, but the dark pass mostly covers what lies under it rather than building translucent depth.
WEAKEST Dark pass largely covers mid pass beneath
STRONGEST Pale outer halo beneath grey and dark bands
The cropped arc carries the eye from left over to the bottom right, and the white opening is shaped. The lower left is leftover, and the spatter dots clutter the bottom centre.
WEAKEST Empty lower-left corner and scattered centre spatter
STRONGEST Open paper inside the arc
At the bottom right, the arc's end pools into a blotched, tide-edged pale patch with drips, visible in colour. There are faint stain spots in the white opening, and paper creases show across the greys.
WEAKEST Pooled blotchy patch at bottom-right arc end
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain at lower-left arc edge
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: 2 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 21 edge segments, 24% crisp, 67% soft or bloomed, 10% 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 6.0.
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.