T_320
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.05.31, day 154
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S11, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P3 The Floor Rises
- 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
- Tonal depth
- 2.2
- Layering
- 2.2
- Composition
- 2.4
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 60%
- Dark share
- 33%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 2, other 7, tide line 2
Peter's own rating
- Rating
- 8
“There is always something that can be done better.”Peter Yuill · 2026.07.02
Older engine
- V10C
- 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.
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: 0.054 (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
“A spiralling composition of nested arcs with a strong sweep and a well-shaped open centre. The grey masses are fairly flat inside, the central wedge is blunt, and the splatter at right is loose. Better than R2 on composition.”
Inner dark arc and upper dark band follow the brush's travel; the central grey wedge is a bulky slab with a squared lower end; the right splatter is loose.
WEAKEST Central grey wedge ends in a blunt, filled-in edge
STRONGEST Inner dark arc, left, with dry-brush tail
Dark arcs show streaking and banding (modulation 0.054); the outer grey band and the central wedge are mostly even mid-grey with little internal grading.
WEAKEST Upper-left grey band, flat and even inside
STRONGEST Upper dark band with streaks and stepped density
Grey wash passes lie under the dark arcs and stay readable; the dark band over the grey wedge is clear; roughly three passes, not a sustained sequence.
WEAKEST Right splatter zone blurs the order of passes
STRONGEST Dark arc laid legibly over the grey band, left
Nested arcs carry the eye from lower left, up over the top and out into the splash at right; the open centre paper is strongly shaped.
WEAKEST Busy drip and splatter cluster at right
STRONGEST Spiralling sweep of arcs around the open centre
Ink is mostly controlled with good dry-brush edges; the central grey wedge has a slightly milky mottle; stray drops at top right and drips at lower right.
WEAKEST Mottled, cloudy interior of central grey wedge
STRONGEST Dry-brush tail on the inner 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, 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 19 edge segments, 32% crisp, 32% soft or bloomed, 37% 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.