T_373
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
- 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
- 2.2
- Tonal depth
- 1.2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.8
- Ink cover
- 84%
- Dark share
- 66%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 12, water stain 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.
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: 0.036 (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
“This is a confident concentric arc in R3's idiom, with well-shaped strokes and legible stepped inner rings. The dominant black mass is flat inside and crowds the sheet, so it falls below R3. The surface is clean apart from minor spots.”
The great dark arc and the inner stepped rings are concentric brush-travelled forms with holding walls. The ends at the lower left and lower right are cut square but still read as made.
WEAKEST Blunt square-cut terminals of arc at lower right
STRONGEST Sweeping dark arc whose walls follow the brush travel
Dark interior modulation of 0.036 is flat. The big black arc shows only faint paper-wrinkle texture. The inner grey rings and the outer left bands give four tonal steps.
WEAKEST Interior of the main dark arc is flat
STRONGEST Stepped grey rings around the central keyhole opening
The grey passes at the inner ring and outer left bands stay legible where they overlap. The dominant black pass mostly blankets what lies beneath it, so the order reads only at the edges.
WEAKEST Dark arc covers earlier passes rather than building on them
STRONGEST Translucent stepped rings at the inner edge
The arc carries the eye around to a shaped white keyhole at the bottom centre. With 0.84 ink coverage the dark band fills the frame and leaves little breathing room above.
WEAKEST Heavy dark mass crowds the top and sides
STRONGEST Keyhole of white paper opening downward
The ink is controlled throughout. Small spots sit at the bottom left and a dark smudge streak lies in the outer left band, all away from the main dark mass.
WEAKEST Small drips and smudge on lower-left outer band
STRONGEST Clean dry-brush edges on the stepped inner rings
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, 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.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 47% crisp, 53% soft or bloomed, 0% 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 1.2A 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.