T_291
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
- 5.3
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 1.4
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 73%
- Dark share
- 48%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 7
Older engine
- V7
- 7
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: 0.033 (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
“The sweeping dark arc is fluent and gives the composition its direction, but its interior is tonally flat. The grey layers stay legible, the left block is blunt, and paper creases are a minor surface issue. An ordinary sheet overall.”
Main arc holds its walls and follows the travel of the stroke; lower grey arc is coherent; left vertical mass is blunt and slab-like.
WEAKEST Bulky left vertical block with ragged clumped edges
STRONGEST Great dark arc following the brush's sweep
Dark modulation 0.033 is flat; the main dark arc changes tone mostly at its edges. The grey arcs and dry-brush flecks add a few steps.
WEAKEST Dark arc interior nearly uniform
STRONGEST Lower grey arc with streaked graded tone
Pale grey arc passes and the left grey sweeps sit under the dark arc and stay readable at its edges; the dark pass mostly covers what lies under it.
WEAKEST Dark arc largely covers the earlier grey pass
STRONGEST Grey upper arc legible beneath dark arc
The arc carries the eye from upper left to lower right around a shaped white void. The left vertical mass sits awkwardly at the edge.
WEAKEST Left block crowds the edge, weakly joined
STRONGEST Sweeping arc enclosing shaped white space
Ink is controlled and the dry-brush flecks work. Crease lines in the paper show through the dark arc, mostly in the tone-stretched view; there are no tide lines.
WEAKEST Paper creases visible across dark arc
STRONGEST Dry-brush flecks on right of arc
2 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 2 distinct places, 7 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: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 5 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 13 edge segments, 69% crisp, 23% soft or bloomed, 8% 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 1.4A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.3.
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.