Chiaroscuro is the way a painter uses light and shadow to make a flat surface look solid. The light comes from one side, so the parts of a body turned toward it are bright and the parts turned away go dark.
Between the two, the tones darken by small degrees. From those gradual changes, the eye understands that a cheek is round and that the eyes sit in hollows.
The Dutch painter Rembrandt shows the idea at work in a self-portrait he made in 1669, at sixty-three. He paints himself as an old man with a heavy, lined face, his hands clasped in front of him.
The face comes forward out of a dark brown background. The light falls on the forehead and the nose, while the side of the head and the clothes slip back into the gloom.
The name of the effect is Italian. It joins two adjectives, chiaro, "light" or "clear," and scuro, "dark." The word is kept for pictures in which that contrast does the work of giving the forms their volume.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Painters were not the first to use it. The word began as the name of a printing method, and its story starts with an Italian printmaker known as Ugo da Carpi.
In 1516, Ugo da Carpi asked the Senate of Venice, the council that governed the city, for a privilege. Venice was one of the great printing centers of Europe, and a privilege stopped other printers there from copying his work.
What he wanted to protect was a new way of printing "in chiaro et scuro," in light and dark, which he presented as his own invention. The Senate agreed that year, and in 1518 Pope Leo X gave him a second privilege, valid in the lands the pope ruled.
The method printed a single picture from several carved blocks of wood, pressed one after another onto the same sheet. The result looked like a kind of drawing that artists of the time also called chiaroscuro.
Those drawings were made on blue or brown paper. The artist marked the shadows in a darker tone, then brushed in the lit parts with white gouache, an opaque paint thinned with water.
Painters had been modeling forms in light and shadow long before Ugo da Carpi was born, yet they did not borrow his word until the late seventeenth century. It came to them through a quarrel between two camps of French critics.
How a block of wood printed light
Ugo's Hercules and Antaeus, cut around 1517 to 1518 after a design by Raphael, the most celebrated painter in Rome, shows what the Senate was protecting. The hero lifts the giant Antaeus off the ground to crush him, and their muscles shine where the light strikes them.
Those bright spots, called highlights, are what a draftsman would have added in white gouache. On Ugo's sheet, not one of them was printed.
What You'll Discover
What Ugo da Carpi cut away to make light.
Which French quarrel gave painting the word.
Leonardo's recipe for lighting a face.
Where chiaroscuro ends and tenebrism begins.
What thick paint did for Rembrandt's face.