T_278
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
- 5.7
- Form
- 2.2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2.4
- Composition
- 2.2
- Material and surface
- 1
- Ink cover
- 88%
- Dark share
- 64%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- bloom 6, water stain 4, other 5, tide line 2
Older engine
- V7
- 8
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: 0.063 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 2 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
“Fluent spiral of layered arcs with legible pass order and strong rotational movement; crowded coverage, flat lower diagonal and bloomy wash runs at lower-left hold it near the archive average.”
Outer spiral arc, inner dry-brush arc and long diagonal sweep all follow brush travel; small bottom-right stroke exact; only lower-left terminus softens into wash.
WEAKEST Ragged dissolving lower-left end of outer arc
STRONGEST Inner dry-brush black arc ending in crisp hook
Outer arc shows bands and stepped density; inner arc has dry-brush grain; the dark lower-right sweep reads largely uniform in colour view.
WEAKEST Lower diagonal black sweep, near-flat interior
STRONGEST Outer arc's grey-to-black banding along its curve
Wide translucent grey ring, dark outer arc, inner grey band, dry black arc and diagonal sweep sit in readable order; overlaps at top right stay legible.
WEAKEST Dark diagonal covering earlier grey passes beneath
STRONGEST Grey ring beneath dark arc at top right
Spiral and diagonal give strong rotation into the white core, but 88% coverage leaves empty paper mostly leftover except the centre; lower-left is muddled.
WEAKEST Crowded lower half, little shaped empty paper
STRONGEST Spiral movement drawing eye into central white
Pale wash runs with ragged bloom edges at lower-left and bottom-centre abut the main arc, visible in colour view; paper creases cross dark masses.
WEAKEST Bloomy wash runs at lower-left beside outer arc
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain on inner black arc
7 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 7 distinct places, 17 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 18 edge segments, 61% crisp, 22% soft or bloomed, 17% 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.
5 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.7.
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.