T_384
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.09.20, day 266
- Size
- 50 × 100 cm
- Paper
- S14, Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper
- Inks
- MB6, MB8, MB9
- Phase
- P4 S14
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 6.5
- Form
- 2.2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2.6
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 77%
- Dark share
- 71%
- Tonal steps
- 5
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 17
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: 0.052 (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 concentric-arc sheet like R3 but heavier: a large, mostly flat black centre swallows the layered passes. Grey fans and the arc's sweep work, though slab blocks and crowding on the right hold it to ordinary.”
Concentric arc bands hold their walls and follow the sweep; the top-centre black block and the upper-right wedges read as filled slabs rather than travelled strokes.
WEAKEST Rectangular dark slab at top centre, blunt and stiff
STRONGEST Inner concentric arcs bottom centre follow brush travel
Grey arcs on left and outer right show stepped densities; the dominant central black (71% dark share) is mostly flat, with only grain visible when tone-stretched.
WEAKEST Central black mass, near-uniform in colour view
STRONGEST Left grey fan bands with stepped translucent density
Pale fans upper left and outer right rings stack in readable order; in the centre the dark passes merge so the sequence is lost.
WEAKEST Centre passes fused into one black
STRONGEST Translucent grey fans at upper left overlap legibly
The arc gives clear rotational movement and shapes the white bottom-left void; the right half is jammed with dark, leaving little air there.
WEAKEST Heavy black mass crowding the right half
STRONGEST Sweeping quarter-circle carrying the eye down-right
Ink is controlled and edges crisp; small spatter specks at left edge and lower left, drips top right, and crease lines in bottom-left paper sit away from principal masses.
WEAKEST Stray specks and paper creases bottom left
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain at edges of top-centre block
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, 17 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.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
5 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.