T_355
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.06.14, day 168
- Size
- 180 × 97 cm
- Paper
- S10, Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu bark, Exhibition Edition
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P3 The Floor Rises
- 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
- 6.8
- Form
- 2.4
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2.8
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 90%
- Dark share
- 62%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 3, other 6, dead ink 1
Peter's own rating
- Rating
- 9
“There is always something that can be done better.”Peter Yuill · 2026.07.02
Older engine
- V10C
- 8
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: 0.043 (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
“The arc-and-fan construction is related to R3 and the passes are legibly layered. But the sheet is crowded, the central dark is flat, and the lower mass is bulky, which keeps it near ordinary.”
Arc sweeps and the fan follow the brush's travel and their walls hold. The big lower-left dark mass reads as filled-in bulk, not a fluent stroke.
WEAKEST bulky filled lower-left dark quarter-disc
STRONGEST radiating fan strokes at bottom right
The tone-stretched view shows banding in the upper arcs and the fan. Dark interior modulation is 0.043, below the flat threshold, so the main dark core stays flat.
WEAKEST central dark core of lower arc mass
STRONGEST banded greys in upper arc sweeps
Several translucent arc passes overlap in a readable order across the upper spiral and the bottom fan. Overlaps build depth, though they thicken toward the centre.
WEAKEST dense centre where passes stack toward black
STRONGEST overlapping translucent fan blades at bottom
A strong S-spiral moves the eye from the top arc to the bottom fan. At 90% coverage it is crowded, and the only shaped space is the small left notch.
WEAKEST crowded sheet with little shaped empty paper
STRONGEST S-shaped double spiral carrying the eye downward
The ink is controlled, with bristle grain at the arc edges. Mottled cloudiness inside the lower-left mass shows only in the stretched view. Stray dots sit at the bottom right.
WEAKEST cloudy mottling inside lower-left dark mass
STRONGEST dry-brush bristle grain on 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, 10 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), 4 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 13 edge segments, 39% crisp, 39% soft or bloomed, 23% 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 2.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 6.8.
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.