T_374
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
- 5.3
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 1.4
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 70%
- Dark share
- 65%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 8, water stain 1, ring 1, dead ink 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: 0.049 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 4 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
“Stacked translucent curved slabs in the manner of R3, but they merge into a heavy, crowded black core. The layering is legible only at the edges. Composition is inert and centralised, with minor drips.”
Stacked curved slabs hold their walls and the right edge follows the brush's arc, but the central black mass is bulky, filled-in and stiff.
WEAKEST Bulky central black slab with blunt lower-left corner
STRONGEST Curved right-hand slab edge sweeping down to the bottom right
Grey slabs step clearly at top and right; stretched view shows crinkle grain inside the core, but in the colour view the centre reads flat black (modulation 0.049).
WEAKEST Central black core, nearly uniform in colour view
STRONGEST Stepped grey slab edges at top and right
Several translucent passes are legible where their edges step at the top and left, but in the centre they merge, so the order is lost.
WEAKEST Centre where the passes fuse into one black
STRONGEST Translucent stacked slab edges at top centre
One huge mass fills about 70% of the sheet and sits centrally. The empty paper is leftover margin; the bottom-right arc only hints at movement.
WEAKEST Massive central block crowding the sheet
STRONGEST Arc sweeping down toward the bottom right
Ink is controlled, with dry-brush streaks at lower right. Drips at bottom left and mottled pale patches at the left edge are small and away from the core. The violet dot is colour ink.
WEAKEST Mottled grey wash patches at left edge
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks at lower right slab end
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: 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 14 edge segments, 43% crisp, 57% 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 1.4A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.3.
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.