Chiaroscuro

About Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro, Italian for 'light-dark', is the modelling of form through contrasts of light and shadow, so that a flat surface seems to hold rounded bodies in space. Renaissance painters built it up through soft transitions, and draughtsmen used tinted paper, adding shadows in ink and highlights in white.

The word also names a printmaking technique. In the early 16th century Hans Burgkmair in Augsburg and Ugo da Carpi in Venice printed woodcuts from several blocks in graded tones, imitating wash drawings. Baroque painters pushed contrast to extremes: Caravaggio and his followers set figures in near darkness, a manner sometimes called tenebrism. Rembrandt van Rijn used deep shadow to suggest inner life, and Joseph Wright of Derby lit a scientific demonstration with one hidden lamp in A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (about 1766). The principle survives wherever one strong light shapes a face, from studio photography to film noir.