Chiaroscuro

The Incredulity associated with Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

Chiaroscuro (Italian: “light-dark”) in art is seen as a strong contrasts between light and dark painting color, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It's also a technical term used by artists and art historians for implementing contrasts of sunshine to attain a sense of volume in modeling three-dimensional objects like the human body.

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

Origin in the chiaroscuro drawing
Chiaroscuro originated during the Renaissance as drawing on coloured paper, in which the artist worked from this base tone towards light, with white gouache, and dark, with ink, body colour or watercolour. 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 the technique. When discussing Italian art, the term is sometimes used to mean painted images in monochrome or two colours, more generally known in English through the French equivalent, grisaille. The word early broadened in meaning to pay for all strong contrasts in illumination between light and dark areas in art, that is now the main meaning.

Chiaroscuro modeling
The more technical use of the term chiaroscuro is the effect of sunshine modeling in painting, drawing or printmaking, where three-dimensional volume is suggested through the value gradation of colour and the analytical division of sunshine and shadow shapes - often called “shading”. The invention of those effects in the western world, “skiagraphia” or “shadow-painting” towards the Ancient Greeks, was traditionally ascribed towards the famous Athenian painter from the 5th century BC, Apollodoros. Although virtually no Ancient Greek painting survives, their knowledge of the result of light modelling can still be observed in the late 4th century BC mosaics of Pella, Macedonia, in particular the Deer Hunt, in the home from 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 centre Ages being standard by the early fifteenth-century in painting and manuscript illumination in Italy and Flanders, after which spread to any or all Western art. The Raphael painting illustrated, with light from the left, demonstrates both delicate modelling chiaroscuro to provide volume towards the body of the model, and also strong chiaroscuro in the more common sense within the contrast between your well-lit model and the very dark background of foliage. However, to further complicate matters, the compositional chiaroscuro from the contrast between model and background could possibly 't be described by using this term, since the two elements are almost completely separated. The word is mostly used to describe compositions where at least some principal elements of the main composition show the transition between light and dark, as with the Baglioni and Gertgen to 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 have seen in his works, reflecting the views of his patron Queen Elizabeth I of England:”seeing that better to show oneself needeth no shadow of place but rather the open light…Her Majesty..Chose her place to take that purpose in the open alley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near, nor any shadow at all…”

In drawing techniques and prints hatching, or shading by parallel lines, is often accustomed to achieve modeling chiaroscuro. Washes, stipple or dotting effects and “surface tone” in printmaking is also techniques.