T_372
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
- 7.5
- Form
- 3
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 3
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 70%
- Dark share
- 59%
- Tonal steps
- 6
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 4, other 5, bloom 1, tide line 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.
6 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: 0.050 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, one answer.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“The single fan of layered arcs has fluent form and clearly stepped translucent passes, like R3. It falls short of R3 on tonal depth and composition, with a cloudy upper wash and a leftover bottom-left corner.”
Fan of arc strokes follows the brush's rotation; dark central arc ends in a clean curved tip; stepped right edges are exact, outer left grey softer.
WEAKEST Pale outer left sweep, edges softening into wash
STRONGEST Central dark arc with crisp curved tail
Dark arc shows fine concentric streaks and a pale ridge line; modulation 0.0496 only just above flat; upper grey interior cloudy rather than modelled.
WEAKEST Cloudy mottled grey in upper-middle wash
STRONGEST Concentric streaked banding in dark central arc
Several translucent passes fan out in visible steps on the right, dark arc laid over greys; order readable across the sheet, slightly muddled at top centre.
WEAKEST Upper-middle overlaps blur into cloudy grey
STRONGEST Stepped translucent fan edges on right
One large fan mass sweeps diagonally with clear rotation; top-right paper with drips shaped, but bottom-left empty space is leftover and single mass lacks tension.
WEAKEST Bottom-left corner paper feels leftover
STRONGEST Diagonal fan sweep from upper left to lower right
Ink controlled with dry-brush streaks in arc; upper-centre grey has cloudy mottle and faint tide edges; drips and spatter at top edge, pink tint lower right is colour.
WEAKEST Cloudy mottled patches in upper grey wash
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking in dark arc
4 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 4 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: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 2 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 14 edge segments, 57% crisp, 21% soft or bloomed, 21% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
6 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 7.5.
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.