CHIAROSCURO. - It is determined in the vision of objects by the contrast between parts in light and parts in shadow. In art, these are said to be rendered in chiaroscuro when they are rendered in their plastic values with the various gradations of a single tint. Drawings and engravings are based on this system in general terms; but all pictorial techniques, using a single color, can serve to execute chiaroscuro or "monochrome" works.
Chiaroscuro is also an essential part of polychrome painting, which would not succeed in rendering relief if it did not reproduce the variations that colors undergo according to whether they are more or less illuminated. In some periods painters expressed themselves using pure color, without volumes acquiring plastic definiteness by means of chiaroscuro; this is the tendency proper to classical art before the 5th century and which is found again among the Byzantines, the Persians, the Indians and generally among the peoples of the Far East. Classical art after the 5th century, and generally all Western art, does not however renounce, even when it confronts the problem of color, the plasticity of bodies obtained with the aid of chiaroscuro. To the concept of a painting based on chiaroscuro values, where the parts in light tend toward white and those in shadow toward black, is opposed that of a tonal painting, that is, of that painting which, following the example of the great Venetians and with notable contributions from the modern currents of the Impressionists, Macchiaioli, etc., bases the representation on harmonies of "tones." "Tone" is the value that individual colors acquire according to the quantity of light that they absorb and therefore reflect.
Bibliography3 works
Corrado Mezzana