T_375
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
- 6.5
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2.8
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 79%
- Dark share
- 71%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 8, dead ink 1, 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: 0.055 (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
“This is a stepped-arc fan in the manner of R3, but one dense, flat black slab dominates it, covering the layering and crowding the right edge. An ordinary, sound sheet: rung 2 throughout.”
Outer arcs on the right and lower left follow the curve of the stroke. The central black quarter-fan is a heavy filled block with a stiff square corner at the lower right.
WEAKEST Bulky central black fan slab, filled rather than drawn
STRONGEST Outer right arc bands following the brush's sweep
The upper-left and outer-right bands show grain, streaks and stepped density. The large central black reads almost flat; the stretched view shows only faint creases (modulation 0.055).
WEAKEST Central black mass, nearly uniform in colour view
STRONGEST Grey stepped bands in upper left and outer arcs
Translucent grey passes step outward legibly at the top-left and lower-left arcs. The final dense black covers most of the earlier layering in the centre.
WEAKEST Central black pass covers the earlier passes beneath it
STRONGEST Stacked translucent grey bands at the top-left edge
One fan form fills about 79% of the sheet and pushes against the right edge. The curve leads the eye to the open lower-left corner, but the dark centre sits heavy and static.
WEAKEST Crowded, heavy right side; mass presses the edge
STRONGEST Arc sweep curving toward the open lower-left corner
The ink is controlled throughout. The pink edging at the top is deliberate colour. Small dots and spatter sit on the left paper, away from the masses. No tide lines inside the black.
WEAKEST Scattered spatter and dots in the left margin
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking at the right and bottom arc edges
2 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 2 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 15 edge segments, 20% crisp, 80% 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 2.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 6.5.
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.