T_371
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.09.12, day 258
- Size
- 100 × 90 cm
- Paper
- S14, Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper
- Inks
- MB6, MB7, MB8, MC
- Phase
- P4 S14
- 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
- 5.2
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 1.6
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.6
- Ink cover
- 82%
- Dark share
- 53%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 3, other 6, dead ink 1, bloom 2, ring 1
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: 0.038 (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
“A fan of concentric arcs related to R3, but it is dominated by one flat, slab-like black wedge that covers the earlier passes. The grey outer arcs give it movement and some layering. It is ordinary overall, with thin tonal depth.”
Concentric fan arcs read as made forms with holding walls; the central black wedge is a heavy filled slab with stiff straight radial edges.
WEAKEST large dark fan slab is bulky, filled-in
STRONGEST outer grey arc bands following brush travel
Dark interior modulation 0.038 is flat; the dominant black wedge shows only crinkle texture. Grey outer arcs have streaks, but the principal mass is dead.
WEAKEST central black fan interior flat
STRONGEST lower grey arcs with streaked banding
Several stepped arc passes legible at right and bottom edges, but the large black pass mostly obliterates what lies beneath rather than building translucently.
WEAKEST black slab covers earlier passes
STRONGEST stepped grey arcs upper right and bottom
Fan arc gives a clear rotational direction and the inner semicircle shapes paper at top; the black mass dominates and the ink fills 82% of sheet.
WEAKEST heavy black mass crowds centre-left
STRONGEST sweeping arc movement from left to right
Ink controlled; spatters top right and a cloudy grey patch near inner arc top are small; paper wrinkling visible across black wedge.
WEAKEST creased cockled texture in black mass
STRONGEST dry-brush streaking in lower grey arcs
3 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 3 distinct places, 13 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: 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 14 edge segments, 36% crisp, 64% soft or bloomed, 0% 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.
1 major flaw: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.6A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.2.
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.