What is Chiaroscuro?

Chiaroscuro is a painting technique that uses tones, shades, shadows and highlights to create an illusion of three dimensions on two -dimensional media. Chiaroscuro, developed in the Renaissance, comes from Italian words for clear or clear and dark or dark . It is usually translated as "light darkness". Before the Renaissance, with its fermentation intellectual activity, painting was like art to now what we would now characterize as "primitive". The shapes were defined by outlines and colors were flat aircraft, according to today's standards drawn. A black car on a sunny day is a perfect illustration - Toflect Blue will be shades from a clear sky and other colors from its surroundings, including the colors of all cars around. Most people, however, deduct reflected lights and shadow and "see" the car as simply black .

The primitive painter can paint a shiny red bowl on the blue tablecloth as a flat crescent, perhaps with a black outline.The painter adept at Chiaroscuro would include white or yellow highlights at the point of the bowl closest to the light source and part of the bowl that did not illuminate the light, perhaps be chestnuts and deepened to brown or black. The blue cloth would reflect the blue shade to the bottom of the bowl, light on the light side and darker on the side of the light.

All artists from the Renaissance were influenced by the development of Chiaroscuro techniques. From modeling three dimensions on flat surfaces by shading and highlighting, today, rather than a radical departure, the term chiaroscuro is now usually reserved for the very dramatic use of contrasting light and darkness. The painter most often associated with Chiaroscuro is Michelangelo Merisa da Caravaggio, which is usually referred to by his "urban" Caravaggie, maybe prevent confusion with another Michaelangelo.