T_283
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
- 6.5
- Form
- 2.4
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2.4
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 84%
- Dark share
- 39%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 11
Older engine
- V7
- 5
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: 0.030 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 3 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
“This is a confident arc composition in the family of R3, but it has fewer passes and its dominant black band is flat inside. The sheet is sound and ordinary overall: it works without standing out.”
Arcs follow the sweep of the brush and hold their walls. The lower black band is a heavy slab, though, and its left ends are cut off bluntly.
WEAKEST Bulky dark lower arc with blunt squared left end
STRONGEST Upper grey arc's dry-brush tail, top left
The upper arcs show banding and stepped greys, with 5 tonal steps. The interior of the main dark arc is flat (modulation 0.030); tone changes only near its edges.
WEAKEST Flat interior of lower black arc
STRONGEST Banded grey upper arcs, top right
Two or three translucent arc passes stagger at the left ends and lower centre and stay legible. The dark band mostly covers what lies beneath it.
WEAKEST Dark arc covers earlier passes beneath it
STRONGEST Staggered translucent arc ends at left
A single fan sweep carries the eye from the left up and down to the bottom right. The paper under the arc is shaped, but the ink covers 84% of the sheet and the top is crowded.
WEAKEST Crowded upper half with little breathing paper
STRONGEST Sweeping arc movement left to bottom right
The ink is controlled. Small spatter drops sit on the paper at the left, away from the main masses, and paper creases show only faintly. No tide lines in the dark masses.
WEAKEST Stray drips near left arc ends
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks in upper arc edges
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, 11 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), 4 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 16 edge segments, 13% crisp, 38% soft or bloomed, 50% 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 6.5.
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.