Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro, from the Italian for light-dark, is a technique using strong contrasts between light and dark to model three-dimensional volume and create dramatic emphasis within a two-dimensional image. Developed by Renaissance painters including Leonardo da Vinci and brought to its most extreme and theatrical expression by Caravaggio and his followers in the seventeenth century, the technique typically illuminates a scene from a single, often unseen, light source against a dark or neutral ground, isolating figures and heightening emotional intensity. The related and more extreme form tenebrism, associated especially with Caravaggio and Jusepe de Ribera, pushes the contrast further, plunging most of the composition into near-total darkness around a sharply lit focal point. Chiaroscuro also became a printmaking technique in its own right, the chiaroscuro woodcut, which builds tonal gradation from multiple wood blocks inked in different values of a single hue.