T_395
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.10.16, day 292
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S14, Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized
- Inks
- MB6, MB8, MB9, MB10
- Phase
- P4 S14
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 6.2
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2.4
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 80%
- Dark share
- 70%
- Tonal steps
- 3
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 1, other 9, dead ink 2, bloom 1
How the number was made
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.8, on 2026.10.16: 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.
3 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: 0.051 (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
“A spiral of layered radial strokes, close to R3 in idea, with strong ordered translucent passes. The over-dense, near-flat black mass at the lower right crowds the sheet and weighs down its form, tone and composition.”
Radial strokes follow the brush's travel around the spiral; the top rays end in stiff rectangular blocks, and the lower-right mass reads as filled bulk rather than strokes.
WEAKEST Lower-right dark mass merges into bulky undifferentiated slab
STRONGEST Arcing strokes winding tightly into the spiral eye
Modulation 0.051 is only just above flat. Greys step through the rays and the left fan, but the large central-right black barely varies in the colour view.
WEAKEST Dense black lower-right quadrant, near-flat inside
STRONGEST Graded translucent rays at upper right and left fan
Many translucent arc passes overlap in clear order at the rim and in the left fan, building depth; the order is lost only in the blackest centre-right area.
WEAKEST Overlaps inside the darkest mass become hard to read
STRONGEST Stacked translucent rays around the outer rim
The spiral gives a strong rotating direction, and the left fan answers it. With 80% ink coverage the lower right is jammed and the empty paper is reduced to the left margin.
WEAKEST Crowded heavy mass filling the lower right
STRONGEST Spiral eye drawing movement around the sheet
Ink handling is controlled and the dry-brush edges are used well. The stretched view shows paper creases and a small pale cloudy patch at the upper right; neither shows at viewing distance in the colour view.
WEAKEST Crinkled, cloudy texture in the central black
STRONGEST Dry-brush ragged ends on the upper rays
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, 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.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
3 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 6.2.
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.