The most famous chiaroscuro paintings include Caravaggio's Calling of Saint Matthew, Georges de La Tour's Penitent Magdalene and Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast. Here are ten, and how each painter built the light itself.
Chiaroscuro is a technique, not a mood. It means placing one light source in a dark room and deciding exactly how far it reaches.
In brief
Caravaggio painted with almost no visible light source, just a beam that seems to come from outside the canvas.
Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes in Florence is her second version of the subject, painted around 1620, eight years after an earlier one now in Naples.
Georges de La Tour built his scenes around a single candle flame, sometimes doubled in a mirror.
Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast turns a hand of fire into the only light in the room.
The word chiaroscuro comes from Italian, chiaro for clear and oscuro for dark.
1. Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599 to 1600)
A single shaft of light falls across the tax collector's table in the Contarelli Chapel, Rome, where the canvas has hung since 1600. Caravaggio paints no candle and no window frame catching the sun, just the light itself pointing at Matthew.
The chapel is often lit by nothing but a coin operated lamp today. Visitors drop a coin and the beam inside the painting suddenly makes sense against the real dark of the room.
2. Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes (about 1599)
Judith's arm and Holofernes's twisted face sit in full light while the tent around them disappears into black. Caravaggio gives the violence no shadow to hide in.
The painting stayed in a private Roman collection for three centuries before entering the Palazzo Barberini in 1971. For most of that time, almost no one outside Italy had seen it in person.
3. Caravaggio, The Supper at Emmaus (1601)
Christ's face sits half in shadow at the moment of recognition, in a canvas painted for the Roman merchant Ciriaco Mattei in 1601. The light comes from the left, low and hard, throwing the apostle's arm out of the canvas in a trick of foreshortening.
A basket of fruit sits at the edge of the table, lit as brightly as the faces above it. Caravaggio gives a still life the same attention as a miracle.
4. Caravaggio, The Entombment of Christ (1603 to 1604)
Four men lower a body onto a stone slab, every muscle picked out by a light that seems to rise from below the frame. Caravaggio painted it around 1603 for a chapel in Santa Maria in Vallicella, Rome.
Rubens and Cezanne both made copies of this composition. The stone corner jutting into the viewer own space is one of the most repeated devices in the century of painting that followed it.
5. Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (about 1620)
Blood arcs across the sheets in a single bright zone while the rest of the room stays barely visible. This is the Uffizi version, painted about eight years after the artist first tackled the same subject in a canvas now in Naples.
The canvas measures over a metre and a half wide. In the dark, only the hands, the blade and the two faces catch any light at all.
6. Georges de La Tour, The Penitent Magdalene (about 1640)
One candle burns on a table and its reflection doubles in a mirror, the only two light sources in the entire canvas. Mary Magdalene rests her hand on a skull, her face lit from below by the flame.
Mr and Mrs Charles Wrightsman gave the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978. La Tour painted the same subject several times, changing only small details in the candle and the objects on the table.
7. Georges de La Tour, Joseph the Carpenter (about 1642)
A young Christ holds a candle for his father while wood shavings curl on the floor between them. The child's hand glows red where it shields the flame, a detail La Tour repeats across several of his candlelit scenes.
Joseph works with an auger, boring into a wooden beam. Fewer than fifty paintings worldwide are confidently attributed to La Tour, and the Louvre has held this one since the last century.
8. Gerrit van Honthorst, Christ before the High Priest (about 1617)
A candle sits on the table between Christ and Caiaphas, hidden by the priest's raised hand so only its glow survives on the panel. Van Honthorst had just returned to the Dutch Republic after years in Rome studying Caravaggio's paintings directly.
Italians nicknamed him Gherardo delle Notti, meaning Gerard of the Nights, for this kind of hidden candle scene. The National Gallery in London bought the painting in 1922.
9. Rembrandt, Belshazzar's Feast (about 1636 to 1638)
Hebrew letters burn in the air above a Babylonian king's feast, lit by a light with no visible source at all. Rembrandt based the Hebrew text on his friend Menasseh ben Israel, a scholar in Amsterdam, rather than inventing the letters himself.
The king's turban and the golden dish flying out of a servant's hands catch the same impossible light as the writing. The National Gallery in London bought the canvas in 1964.
10. Rembrandt, The Night Watch (1642)
The same tool built this painting as every picture on this list, a beam of light that picks out only what matters. Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and his lieutenant step into full light while most of their company stays in the shadow behind them.
It hangs today in a room built specifically for it at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Its size and its history already fill a story on their own, so one look at its light is enough here.
Where the darkness lives
San Luigi dei Francesi and the Vatican Pinacoteca, Rome: Caravaggio's Calling of Saint Matthew and Entombment of Christ.
Palazzo Barberini, Rome: Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes.
National Gallery, London: Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, Van Honthorst's Christ before the High Priest and Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast.
Uffizi Gallery, Florence: Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: La Tour's Penitent Magdalene.
Louvre, Paris: La Tour's Joseph the Carpenter.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: Rembrandt's The Night Watch.
Chiaroscuro paintings, what readers ask
What does chiaroscuro mean? It comes from Italian, chiaro for light and oscuro for dark, and describes strong contrast between the two inside a single image.
Who is the chiaroscuro painter? Caravaggio is the name most linked to the technique, though Georges de La Tour and Rembrandt both built careers on it too.
What is the difference between chiaroscuro and tenebrism? Tenebrism pushes chiaroscuro further, with most of the canvas in darkness and only a small area lit. Caravaggio and La Tour both painted in this more extreme mode.
Is chiaroscuro only from the Baroque period? No. Painters used versions of it before Caravaggio and long after him, but the 1600s produced its most famous examples.
Why the darkness does the work
Chiaroscuro is not decoration.
Every painter on this list decided what the dark should hide before deciding what the light should show. Caravaggio's Entombment alone has been copied by painters from Rubens to Cezanne, four centuries of artists borrowing the same beam of light.
Chiaroscuro sits alongside sfumato, impasto, fresco, pointillism, oil painting, and watercolor in Painting Techniques Explained, a guide to all seven techniques that built these paintings.