Tenebrism is a style of painting in which darkness fills most of the picture and one hard light picks out a few faces, hands and objects. The Italian painter Caravaggio made it famous in Rome around 1600.
Between the lit parts and the shadow there is almost no transition. A cheek is bright, and a little further on the background is already black.
The best place to see the style at work is a chapel inside San Luigi dei Francesi, the church of the French community in Rome. There Caravaggio's Calling of Saint Matthew still hangs. It shows the Gospel moment when Christ chooses Matthew, a tax collector, to follow him.
A few men sit around a table covered with coins. A beam of light enters from the right and falls on their faces, and Christ, who has just come in, points toward them.
Most of the painted room is in shadow, though its back wall and a window can still be made out. In the pictures Caravaggio painted in his last years, even those disappear into black.
The style takes its name from the Italian tenebroso, "dark," itself built on the Latin tenebrae, "darkness." A painter who works in this manner is called a tenebrist.
Caravaggio himself never heard the term, which is recorded in English only from 1959, so the label came long after the paintings. It names the most extreme form of chiaroscuro, the Italian word for building forms out of contrasts of light and dark.
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Long before the word existed, his darkness had been described, and not kindly. The Roman writer Giovan Pietro Bellori, who wrote biographies of the painters of the seventeenth century, published one of the best known early accounts of these dark pictures in 1672.
By then, Caravaggio had been dead for more than six decades, and Bellori meant his account as criticism. He wrote that the painter "never brought his figures out into the daylight" and kept them instead in "the dark brown atmosphere of a closed room."
Bellori also recorded what the painter's rivals said: that the darkness was a limit Caravaggio could not get past. They even had a word for the room he painted in.
A painter stuck in the cellar
The word was cellar. His critics "spread it about that he did not know how to come out of the cellar…" They meant that he could only paint figures in a dark basement lit from one opening. Yet the same hostile biographer, without meaning to, left the most exact account of how that cellar worked.
What You'll Discover
How the darkness was built on the canvas.
Where tenebrism ends and chiaroscuro begins.
Why Rembrandt is not usually called a tenebrist.
How his last paintings grew even darker.
Who carried it from Rome to Spain.
Where the same light turned up in 1972.