T_293
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
- MB6, MB7, MB8
- Phase
- P2 The Switch
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SHP: save, has potential (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 5.3
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.4
- Ink cover
- 85%
- Dark share
- 42%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 8, tide line 4, other 6, bloom 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: 0.052 (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 spiral of grey and black arcs set against a right vertical stroke: it has a clear direction and some grain in the grey passes. The black core is flat and its end is blunt, and pale blots and drips near the centre weaken the surface.”
Large spiral arc and right vertical stroke are coherent and follow brush travel; black inner arc ends in a stubby blunt block with drips at centre.
WEAKEST Blunt, dripping terminus of black inner arc
STRONGEST Broad outer grey arc sweeping left to top
Outer arc and right stroke show bristle streaks, spotting and stepped greys; inner black arc near centre is largely uniform. Modulation 0.052 just above flat threshold.
WEAKEST Dense black inner arc core reads flat
STRONGEST Outer grey arc with bristle banding and grain
Grey outer pass, black inner pass and pale lower washes are distinguishable; overlaps legible but sequence does not build much depth beyond two or three passes.
WEAKEST Pale lower-right washes faint and indistinct
STRONGEST Black inner arc laid over grey outer arc
Spiral drives the eye around a shaped white centre, answered by the right vertical stroke; lower right pale zone is vague and weakly held.
WEAKEST Lower-right pale area loose and undefined
STRONGEST Spiral sweep around shaped central white
Pale cloudy wash blots and tide edges sit against the grey mass end near centre-right; drips and stray spatter below black arc; milky patch lower left inside arc.
WEAKEST Cloudy blots beside the black arc terminus
STRONGEST Dry-brush bristle edges on right vertical stroke
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, 19 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 19 edge segments, 21% crisp, 58% soft or bloomed, 21% 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.
2 major flaws: appliedThe 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.