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Chiaroscuro
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An element in art, chiaroscuro (Italian for lightdark) is defined as a bold contrast between light and dark.
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The term originated as a name for a type of Renaissance drawing on coloured paper, where the artist worked from this base tone towards light, with white gouache, and dark, with ink, bodycolour 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 this technique. The term early broadened in meaning to cover all strong contrasts in illumination between light and dark areas in art.
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. They were first invented by Hans Burgkmair in Germany in 1508, and first made in Italy by Ugo da Carpi a few years later.[1] Other printmakers to use the technique include Cranach , Hans Baldung Grien and Parmigianino. In Germany the technique was only in use for a few years, but Italians continued to use it throughout the sixteenth century, and later artists like Goltzius sometimes made use of it. In the German style, one block usually had only lines and is called the "line block", whilst the other block or blocks had flat areas of colour and are called "tone blocks". The Italians usually used only tone blocks, for a very different effect, much closer to the drawings the term was originally used for, or watercolours.
A certain amount of chiaroscuro is the effect of light modelling in painting, where three-dimensional volume is suggested by highlights and shadow, effects fully developed in early fifteenth-century painting and manuscript illumination in Italy and Flanders. 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 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.
Tenebrism was especially practiced 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. Scenes partly lit by candlelight, probably influenced by both Caravaggio and Elsheimer, were a speciality of the Utrecht School, also known as the Dutch Caravaggisti.
Later artists who specialized in strong but graduated chiaroscuro from candlelight included Georges de La Tour in France, and Joseph Wright of Derby in England. Many 17th century Dutch artists, and in particular Rembrandt, were interested in effects of darkness, but usually without sharp contrasts of light and dark in the Italian way. Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione also explored such effects, especially in his prints, leading him to invent the monotype.
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.
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 on the relative merits of drawing and color in painting (Débat sur le coloris). 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.
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 Tarkovsky's - Stalker_(film) (1979).
However, possibly the best-known example of chiaroscuro in modern filmmaking is the great Italian film Nuovo cinema Paradiso, or 'Cinema Paradiso.'
Frank Miller's Sin City is an example of this style in both the graphic novel and the subsequent film, as is the David Lloyd/Alan Moore book V for Vendetta and Mike Mignola's Hellboy.
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.
Eugene W. Smith, Josef Koudelka, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lothar Wolleh. Annie Liebovitz, Floria Sigismondi and Ralph Gibson may be considered some of the modern masters of chiaroscuro in documentary photography.
In filmmaking, Rembrandt Lighting is characterized by such films as Warren Beatty`s Reds, Steven Soderbergh`s Traffic, and in the documentary landscape by many of Errol Morris`s films, such as, The Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven, films that employ extensive naturalized lighting.
Possibly the most direct personification of the intent of chiaroscuro in filmmaking, though, would perhaps be Stanley Kubrick`s Barry Lyndon, in which the principal photography was shot primarily with a modified Hassalblad lens manufactured for the rigors of space photography. When informed that no lens currently stopped down low enough to shoot a costume drama set in grand palaces using only candle-light, Kubrick bought and retrofitted a special lens for these purposes. 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 cinematographer`s as Laszlo Kovacs, 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, but not are directly, chiaroscuro (high-key lighting, stage lighting, frontal lighting, and other effects are interspersed in ways that diminish the chiaroscuro claim).
With the recent advent of high-speed filmmaking, Barry Lyndon has not stood long as the lone example of unaugmented cinematic chiaroscuro realism. Darius Khondji (Seven), Janusz Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan), Wally Pfister, and Harris Savides carry on the technique using film that, in some instances, is up to 20x faster than the film Kubrick shot Barry Lyndon on.
Chiaroscuro scenes
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Nativity by Geertgen tot Sint Jans |
 Allegory, Boy Lighting Candle in Company of Ape and Fool by El Greco |
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 Crucifixion of Peter by Caravaggio |
 The Flight to Egypt by Adam Elsheimer |
 Nativity by Gerard van Honthorst |
The Matchmaker by Gerrit van Honthorst |
 Mary Magdalene, by Georges de La Tour |
 St. Peter in prison by Rembrandt |
 The Proposition by Judith Leyster |
 Antoine Watteau - La Partie carrée |
 Joseph Wright of Derby, The Orrery |
 Fragonard, The Lock, 1780 |
 Goya, Christ on the Mount of Olives |
 Nikolai Cherkasov as Ivan the Terrible in Sergei Eisenstein's film of the same name. |
Chiaroscuro faces
 Saint Jerome by José de Ribera |
 An Old Man in Red by Rembrandt |
 Self-Portrait by John Everett Millais |
 The Knitting Woman by William-Adolphe Bouguereau |
Chiaroscuro woodcuts
 Saturn, anon Italian, 16th? century. Italian style, with no real line block, and looking rather like a watercolour. |
 Ludolph Buesinck, Aeneas carries his father. German style, with line block and brown tone block |
