Chiaroscuro

For other uses, see Chiaroscuro (disambiguation).

"Clair-obscur" redirects here. For the album by Françoise Hardy, see Clair Obscur. For the book by Jean Cocteau, see Jean Cocteau.

Giovanni Baglione. Sacred and Profane Love. 1602–1603, showing dramatic compositional chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro (English pronunciation: /kiˌɑːrəˈskjʊəroʊ/, Italian: [kjarosˈkuːro] "light-dark") in art is "an Italian term which literally means 'light-dark'. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted".^[1]

Further specialized uses include chiaroscuro woodcut, for coloured woodcuts printed with different blocks, each using a different coloured ink; and chiaroscuro drawing for drawings on coloured paper with drawing in a dark medium and white highlighting. Similar effects in the lighting of cinema and photography are also chiaroscuro.

History

Origin in the chiaroscuro drawing

Chiaroscuro originated during the Renaissance as drawing on coloured paper, where the artist worked from the paper's base tone towards light using white gouache, and towards dark using ink, bodycolour or watercolour.^[2][3] These in turn drew on traditions in illuminated manuscripts, going back to late Roman Imperial manuscripts on purple-dyed vellum. Chiaroscuro woodcuts began as imitations of this technique.^[4] When discussing Italian art, the term is sometimes used to mean painted images in monochrome or two colours, more generally known in English by the French equivalent, grisaille. The term early broadened in meaning to cover all strong contrasts in illumination between light and dark areas in art, which is now the primary meaning.

Chiaroscuro modelling

"La Fornarina" by Raphael, shows delicate modelling chiaroscuro in the body of the model, for example in the shoulder, breast, and arm on the right.

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 invention of these effects in the West, "skiagraphia" or "shadow-painting" to the Ancient Greeks, was traditionally ascribed to the famous Athenian painter of the 5th century BC, Apollodoros. Although virtually no Ancient Greek painting survives, their understanding of the effect of light modelling can still be seen in the late 4th century BC mosaics of Pella, Macedonia, in particular the Deer Hunt, in the House of the Abduction of Helen, inscribed gnosis epoesen, or 'knowledge did it'.

They also survived in rather crude standardized form in Byzantine art and were 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. The Raphael painting illustrated, with light coming from the left, demonstrates both delicate modelling chiaroscuro to give volume to the body of the model, and also strong chiaroscuro in the more common sense in the contrast between the well-lit model and the very dark background of foliage. However, to further complicate matters, the compositional chiaroscuro of the contrast between model and background would probably not be described using this term, as the two elements are almost completely separated. The term is mostly used to describe compositions where at least some principal elements of the main composition show the transition between light and dark, as in the Baglioni and Geertgen tot Sint Jans paintings illustrated above and below.

Chiaroscuro modelling is now taken for granted, but had some opponents; the English portrait miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard cautioned in his treatise on painting against all but the minimal use we see in his works, reflecting the views of his patron Queen Elizabeth I of England:"seeing that best to show oneself needeth no shadow of place but rather the open light...Her Majesty..chose her place to sit for that purpose in the open alley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near, nor any shadow at all..."^[5]

In drawings and prints hatching, or shading by parallel lines, is often used to achieve modelling chiaroscuro. Washes, stipple or dotting effects, and "surface tone" in printmaking are other techniques.

Chiaroscuro woodcuts

Chiaroscuro woodcut of the Virgin and Child by Bartolommeo Coriolano, created between 1630 and 1655. Digitally restored.

Chiaroscuro woodcuts do not necessarily feature strong contrasts of light and dark, but are old master prints in woodcut using two or more blocks printed in different colours. According to the one definition of the term, they were first invented by Lucas Cranach in Germany in 1507, and first made in Italy by Ugo da Carpi a=before 1516.^[6] Other printmakers to use the technique include Cranach, Hans Wechtlin, Hans Baldung Grien and Parmigianino. In Germany the technique peaked around 1520, but it was used in Italy throughout the sixteenth century. Later artists like Goltzius sometimes made use of it. In some German two-block prints, the keyblock (or "line block") was printed in black and the tone block or blocks had flat areas of colour. In Italy, chiaroscuri were produced without keyblocks to achieve a very different effect. They resembled the style of wash drawings also known as chiaroscuro.^[7]

Compositional chiaroscuro to Caravaggio

Nativity at Night by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, c. 1490, after a composition by Hugo van der Goes of c. 1470. Sources of light are the infant Jesus, the shepherds' fire on the hill behind, and the angel who appears to them.

Manuscript illumination was, as in many areas, especially experimental in attempting ambitious lighting effects, as the results were not for public display. The development of compositional chiaroscuro received a considerable impetus in Northern Europe from the vision of the Nativity of Jesus of Saint Bridget of Sweden, a very popular mystic. She described the infant Jesus as emitting light himself; depictions increasingly reduced other light sources in the scene to emphasize this effect, and the Nativity remained very commonly treated with chiaroscuro through to the Baroque. Hugo van der Goes and his followers painted many scenes lit only by candle, or the divine light from the infant Christ. As with some later painters, in their hands the effect was of stillness and calm rather than the drama of the Baroque.

Strong chiaroscuro became a popular effect during the sixteenth century, in Mannerism and in Baroque art. Divine light continued to illuminate, often rather inadequately, the compositions of Tintoretto, Veronese and their many followers. Dark subjects dramatically lit by a shaft of light from a single constricted and often unseen source was a compositional device developed by Ugo da Carpi (c. 1455-c. 1523), Giovanni Baglione (1566–1643) and Caravaggio (1573–1610), the last of whom was crucial in developing the style of tenebrism, where dramatic chiaroscuro becomes a dominant stylistic device.

17th and 18th centuries

The central panel of Peter Paul Rubens's The Elevation of the Cross (1610-1611)is modelled with dynamic chiaroscuro.

Tenebrism was especially practised in Spain and the Spanish-ruled Kingdom of Naples, by Jusepe de Ribera and his followers. Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), a German artist living in Rome, produced several night scenes lit mainly by fire, and sometimes moonlight. Unlike Caravaggio, his dark areas contain very subtle detail and interest. The influences of Caravaggio and Elsheimer were strong on Peter Paul Rubens, who exploited their respective approaches to tenebrosity for dramatic effect in paintings such as The Raising of the Cross (1610–1611).

A particular genre that developed was the nocturnal scene lit by candlelight, which looked back to earlier northern artists like Geertgen tot Sint Jans and more immediately to the innovations of Caravaggio and Elsheimer. This theme played out with many artists from the Low Countries in the first few decades of the 17th century, where it became associated with the Utrecht Caravaggisti like Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen, and with Flemish Baroque painters such as Jacob Jordaens. Rembrandt's early works from the 1620s also adopted the single-candle light source. The nocturnal candle-lit scene re-emerged in the Dutch Republic in the mid 17th century on a smaller scale in the works of fijnschilders such as Gerrit Dou and Gottfried Schalken.

The Matchmaker by Gerrit van Honthorst.

Rembrandt's own interest in effects of darkness shifted in his mature works. He relied less on the sharp contrasts of light and dark that marked the Italian influences of the earlier generation, a factor found in his mid-17th century etchings. In that medium he shared many similarities with his contemporary in Italy, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, whose work in printmaking led him to invent the monotype.

Outside the Low Countries, artists such as Georges de La Tour and Trophime Bigot in France and Joseph Wright of Derby in England, carried on with such strong, but graduated, candlelight chiaroscuro. Watteau used a gentle chiaroscuro in the leafy backgrounds of his fêtes galantes, and this was continued in pictures by many French artists, notably Fragonard. At the end of the century Fuseli and others used a heavier chiaroscuro for romantic effect, as did Delacroix and others in the nineteenth century.

Usage of the term

Joseph Wright of Derby painted several large groups with strong chiaroscuro, like The Orrery

The French use of the term, clair-obscur, was introduced by the seventeenth century art-critic Roger de Piles in the course of a famous argument (Débat sur le coloris) on the relative merits of drawing and colour in painting (his Dialogues sur le coloris, 1673^[8] was a key contribution to the Débat). In English, the Italian term has been used since at least the late 17th century. The term is less often used of art after the late nineteenth century, although the Expressionist and other modern movements make great use of the effect. Especially since the strong 20th century rise in the reputation of Caravaggio, in non-specialist use the term is mainly used for strong chiaroscuro effects such as his, or Rembrandt's. As the Tate puts it: "Chiaroscuro is generally only remarked upon when it is a particularly prominent feature of the work, usually when the artist is using extreme contrasts of light and shade."^[9] Photography and cinema have also adopted the term. For the history of the term, see René Verbraeken, Clair-obscur, histoire d’un mot (Nogent-le-Roi, 1979).^[10]

Classical voice instructors describe the optimal balance of clearness and darkness in the singing voice tone as chiaroscuro: a combination of brightness and "ping" (brilliance and resonance) with warmth and depth i.e. the 'dark' colours (natural or manufactured) of the individual timbre. This technique is one of the main arsenals of dramatic singers especially useful in verismo operas e.g. Tosca, Pagliacci, and Cavalleria rusticana, where it can be used to great effect in recitatives and declamatory passages; it also allows more lyric voices to safely survive the strain of bread-and-butter lyrico-spinto roles such as Mario (Tosca). Famous examples include Zinka Milanov, Maria Callas, Leontyne Price, Anna Moffo, Carlo Bergonzi, Franco Corelli and Renata Scotto.

Cinema and photography

Chiaroscuro is also used in cinematography to indicate extreme low-key lighting to create distinct areas of light and darkness in films, especially in black and white films. Classic examples are The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) and the black and white scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979).

In photography, chiaroscuro is often effected with the use of "Rembrandt lighting". In more highly-developed photographic processes, this technique may also be termed "ambient/natural lighting", although when done so for the effect, the look is artificial and not generally documentary in nature. W. Eugene Smith, Josef Koudelka, Garry Winogrand, Lothar Wolleh, Annie Leibovitz, Floria Sigismondi and Ralph Gibson may be considered some of the modern masters of chiaroscuro in documentary photography.

Still from Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, some of which was shot just by candlelight.

Perhaps the most direct personification of the intent of chiaroscuro in filmmaking, though, would be Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon,^[11]. When informed that no lens currently had a wide enough aperture to shoot a costume drama set in grand palaces using only candlelight, Kubrick bought and retrofitted a special lens for these purposes: a modified Mitchell BNC camera and a Zeiss lens manufactured for the rigors of space photography, with a maximum aperture of f/.7. The naturally unaugmented lighting situations in the film exemplified low-key, natural lighting in filmwork at its most extreme outside of the Eastern European/Soviet filmmaking tradition (itself exemplified by the harsh low-key lighting style employed by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein).

Sven Nykvist, the longtime collaborator of Ingmar Bergman, also informed much of his photography with chiaroscuro realism, as well as Gregg Toland, who influenced such cinematographers as László Kovács, Vilmos Zsigmond, and Vittorio Storaro with his use of deep and selective focus augmented with strong horizon-level key lighting penetrating through windows and doorways. Much of the celebrated film noir tradition relies on techniques Toland perfected in the early thirties that are related to chiaroscuro (though high-key lighting, stage lighting, frontal lighting, and other effects are interspersed in ways that diminish the chiaroscuro claim).

Gallery

Chiaroscuro in modelling; Paintings

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  Fra Angelico in about 1450 already uses chiaroscuro modelling in all elements of the painting.

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  Saint Sebastian by Botticelli, 1474.

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  Velázquez uses subtle highlights and shading on the face and clothes.

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  Vermeer's use of light to model throughout his compositions is exceptionally complex and delicate.

Chiaroscuro in modelling; Prints and drawings

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  Delicate engraved lines of hatching and cross-hatching, not all distinguishable in reproduction, are used to model the faces and clothes in this late 15th century engraving

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  Another 15th century engraving showing highlights and shading, all in lines in the original, used to depict volume.

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  Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci

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  Another study by Leonardo, where the linear make-up of the shading is easily seen in reproduction.

Chiaroscuro as a major element in composition: painting

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  Allegory, Boy Lighting Candle in Company of Ape and Fool by El Greco

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  Annunciation by Domenico Beccafumi

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  Crucifixion of St. Peter by Caravaggio

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  The Flight to Egypt by Adam Elsheimer

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  Landscape chiaroscuro, Jan Both

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  Nativity by Gerard van Honthorst

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  Mary Magdalene, by Georges de La Tour

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  St. Peter in prison by Rembrandt

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  The Proposition by Judith Leyster

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  Antoine Watteau - La Partie carrée

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  Fragonard, The Lock, 1780

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  Goya, Christ on the Mount of Olives

Chiaroscuro as a major element in composition: photography

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  Portrait

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  figurenude study, monochrome

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  Hijab doll in shadow

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  Male nude light and shadow

Chiaroscuro faces

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  Saint Jerome by José de Ribera

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  An Old Man in Red by Rembrandt

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  Self-Portrait by John Everett Millais

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  The Knitting Woman by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Chiaroscuro drawings and woodcuts

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  Man of Sorrows, chiaroscuro drawing on coloured paper, 1516, by Hans Springinklee

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  A 19th century version of the original type of chiaroscuro drawing, with coloured paper, white gouache highlights, and pencil shading.

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  Saturn, anon Italian, 16th? century. Italian style chiaroscuro woodcut, with four blocks, but no real line block, and looking rather like a watercolour.

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  Ludolph Buesinck, Aeneas carries his father. German style, with line block and brown tone block

See also

• Cangiante
• Sfumato
• Tenebrism
• Artemisia Gentileschi

References

1. ^ Glossary of the National Gallery, London [1] (accessed 23 October 2011)
2. ^ Harvard Art Museum glossary (accessed 30 August 2007). See also Metropolitan external link
3. ^ Example from the Metropolitan
4. ^ David Landau & Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, pp.180-84; Yale, 1996, ISBN 0300068832 - discusses these at length. Also see Metropolitan external link.
5. ^ Quotation from Hilliard's Art of Limming, c. 1600, in Nicholas Hilliard, Roy Strong, 1975, p.24, Michael Joseph Ltd, London, ISBN 0718113012
6. ^ http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wdct/ho_17.50.1.htm
7. ^ For an introduction to subject, see David Landau & Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, pp. 179-202; 273-81 & passim; Yale, 1996, ISBN 0300068832
8. ^ [Le rubénisme en Europe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Volume 16 of Museums at the Crossroads, Michèle-Caroline Heck, University of Michigan, Brepols, 2005]
9. ^ Tate Glossary. Retrieved 30 August 2007.
10. ^ Verbraeken, René (1979). Clair-obscur, histoire d’un mot. Nogent-le-Roi: J. Laget. ISBN 2854970217. 
11. ^ "Victorian Studies Bulletin". Northeast Victorian Studies Association, v. 9-11, 1985. 1984

External links

• Chiaroscuro Woodcut from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Timeline of Art History
• Chiaroscuro woodcut from Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas
• (Modelling) chiaroscuro from Evansville University
• Tate, London glossary
• Suzanne Buchan article Animated Chiaroscuro, mostly on photograhic and cinematic chiaroscuro