![]() Hall, which has gained considerable acceptance, chiaroscuro is one of four modes of painting colours available to Italian High Renaissance painters, along with cangiante, sfumato and unione. The technique also survived in rather crude standardized form in Byzantine art and was refined again in the Middle Ages to become standard by the early fifteenth-century in painting and manuscript illumination in Italy and Flanders, and then spread to all Western art.Īccording to the theory of the art historian Marcia B. Although few Ancient Greek paintings survive, their understanding of the effect of light modelling still may be seen in the late-fourth-century BC mosaics of Pella, Macedonia, in particular the Stag Hunt Mosaic, in the House of the Abduction of Helen, inscribed gnosis epoesen, or 'knowledge did it'. The invention of these effects in the West, " skiagraphia" or "shadow-painting" to the Ancient Greeks, traditionally was ascribed to the famous Athenian painter of the fifth century BC, Apollodoros. The more technical use of the term chiaroscuro is the effect of light modelling in painting, drawing, or printmaking, where three-dimensional volume is suggested by the value gradation of colour and the analytical division of light and shadow shapes-often called " shading". The term broadened in meaning early on to cover all strong contrasts in illumination between light and dark areas in art, which is now the primary meaning.ĭetail of La Fornarina (1518–19) by Raphael, shows delicate modelling chiaroscuro in the body of the model, for example in the shoulder, breast, and arm on the right When discussing Italian art, the term sometimes is used to mean painted images in monochrome or two colours, more generally known in English by the French equivalent, grisaille. Chiaroscuro woodcuts began as imitations of this technique. ![]() Such works are called " chiaroscuro drawings", but may only be described in modern museum terminology by such formulae as "pen on prepared paper, heightened with white bodycolour". These in turn drew on traditions in illuminated manuscripts going back to late Roman Imperial manuscripts on purple-dyed vellum. The term chiaroscuro originated during the Renaissance as drawing on coloured paper, where the artist worked from the paper's base tone toward light using white gouache, and toward dark using ink, bodycolour or watercolour. Artists known for using the technique include Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio Rembrandt, Vermeer and Goya, and Georges de la Tour.Ĭhrist at Rest, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1519, a chiaroscuro drawing using pen, ink, and brush, washes, white heightening, on ochre prepared paper Similar effects in cinema, and black and white and low-key photography, are also called chiaroscuro.įurther specialized uses of the term include chiaroscuro woodcut for coloured woodcuts printed with different blocks, each using a different coloured ink and chiaroscuro drawing for drawings on coloured paper in a dark medium with white highlighting.Ĭhiaroscuro is one of the canonical painting modes of the Renaissance (alongside cangiante, sfumato and unione) (see also Renaissance art). It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modelling three-dimensional objects and figures. 1602–1603, showing dramatic compositional chiaroscuroĬhiaroscuro ( English: / k i ˌ ɑːr ə ˈ s k( j) ʊər oʊ/ kee- AR-ə- SKOOR-oh, - SKURE-, Italian: Italian for 'light-dark'), in art, is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition.
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