T_287
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
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 1
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 80%
- Dark share
- 52%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 11, water stain 3, tide line 1
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.
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: 0.034 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, one answer.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“A bold double-arc swirl with good rotation and fluent right-hand strokes. The dark masses are flat inside, the layering is modest, and one end is blunt. It is an ordinary sheet, close to R2.”
The right arc follows the brush's travel with bristle tracks. The top-left arc ends in a stiff rectangular block near the centre, and the grey wedge below it is bulky.
WEAKEST Blunt squared end of top-left arc
STRONGEST Right-hand C-arc sweeping into bottom stroke
Dark interior modulation is 0.034, which is flat. The large dark arcs read as an even charcoal with only faint streaks, and the greys sit mostly at the edges.
WEAKEST Top-left dark arc interior
STRONGEST Bristle streaks along the right arc
Grey passes under both arcs stay visible at their margins, at the centre-left and centre-bottom. The black mostly covers the earlier tone and does not build depth.
WEAKEST Black largely covering the grey underlayers
STRONGEST Grey wash fringe beneath the bottom-right arc
The two opposed arcs set up a clear rotation, and the open paper in the centre is shaped. The bottom right is heavy and crowded, and the scattered drips at bottom left feel incidental.
WEAKEST Crowded heavy bottom-right quadrant
STRONGEST Rotating swirl around the open central paper
The ink is controlled overall. Paper creases and faint mottling show inside the dark masses, and small blots sit in the bottom-right arc. None of this badly disrupts the sheet.
WEAKEST Cloudy, creased interior of the dark arcs
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks at the top of the right arc
5 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 5 distinct places, 15 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), 5 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 19 edge segments, 21% crisp, 47% soft or bloomed, 32% 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 1.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.0.
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.