Sfumato and Chiaroscuro: Light and Shade in Painting

Sfumato is a technique in which the transitions between light and shade are made so soft that no sharp contours are visible, like smoke. Chiaroscuro, light-dark, is the art of modelling figures with strong contrasts between light and dark. Leonardo da Vinci is the master of sfumato and Caravaggio and Rembrandt of chiaroscuro.

Facts

Sfumato: Leonardo’s smoke

In the first generations of the Renaissance figures were drawn with clear contours and then coloured in. Leonardo da Vinci thought this looked unnatural: in reality nothing has a thin line around it. He wrote about making shadows and transitions “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke”, and that is where the word sfumato comes from.

The most famous example is the Mona Lisa, in which the corners of the mouth and eyes are blurred so that the expression seems to change depending on how one looks at it. The Last Supper and his other paintings also show the technique. Read more about the picture in the guide to the Mona Lisa.

How sfumato is done

The technique requires oil paint, which dries slowly and can be blended. Leonardo applied incredibly thin layers, glazes, often only a few thousandths of a millimetre thick, one on top of the other, letting each dry. The result is a surface in which light penetrates the paint and is then reflected, creating soft, glowing skin. Read more about the media in the guide to fresco, tempera and oil and in the section on techniques.

Sfumato suited the Renaissance ideal of naturalness and harmony. Followers such as Giorgione and Correggio continued in the same spirit, and sfumato can be seen in many sixteenth-century portraits, in which faces seem to shimmer out of the shadows.

Chiaroscuro: light as drama

Chiaroscuro is older than Leonardo, but the Baroque made it a dramatic tool. Caravaggio let a single sharp beam of light fall into a dark room, as in The Calling of Saint Matthew of 1600, where the light leads the eye from Christ’s hand to the tax collector. The extreme form, in which darkness swallows most of the picture, is called tenebrism.

Rembrandt used darkness as a psychological force: in The Night Watch and in his portraits faces emerge from a golden gloom, and a small triangle of light on the cheek has become known as Rembrandt lighting, still a classic in photography today. Georges de La Tour painted scenes lit by a single candle, and Artemisia Gentileschi and Rubens used the same strong contrasts; see The Descent from the Cross.

The difference and the legacy

Sfumato is about soft transitions and how form arises without a line. Chiaroscuro is about contrast between light and dark. They can work together, for not all chiaroscuro paintings have sharp edges, but a sfumato painting is not necessarily dramatic. In Leonardo the two meet: the modelling is soft but the light clearly comes from one direction. See more about light and shade in the section on light.

The legacy lives on. Chiaroscuro stands out in Goya’s dark pictures, in twentieth-century film noir and in photography, and in lighting for homes and stage; see lighting in the design section. Sfumato can be found in today’s digital soft transitions. Look for hazy contours or a strong lamp in the dark the next time you see a painting, and you will know which technique you are looking at. The Renaissance is described under the Renaissance and the Baroque in the guide to the Baroque.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which painting is the best-known example of sfumato?