Let There Be Light - Chiaroscuro

Ever wonder how some paintings just seem to glow? This magical effect is several centuries old, and yet it still fascinates curious eyes. How did they do that? Simple: chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is one of my favorite words to say and I love incorporating it into my own works as best as I can. It literally means light and dark and employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow as they define three-dimensional objects. It is more about the value than the color.

This is an example of my experimentation with chiaroscuro.  I painted it from a photo.  I call it the Dutch Girl.

Da Vinci probably brought the technique to it's full potential but I particularly love how Carvaggio used the effect. His followers used a harsh, dramatic light to isolate their figures and heighten their emotional tension. Another outstanding master of chiaroscuro was Rembrandt, who used it with remarkable psychological effect in his paintings, drawings, and etchings. Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velazquez, and many other, lesser painters of the Baroque period also used chiaroscuro to great effect. The delicacy and lightness of 18th-century Rococo painting represents a rejection of this dramatic use of chiaroscuro, but the technique again became popular with artists of the Romantic period, who relied upon it to create the emotive effects they considered so important in their art.

"Narcissus" by Caravaggio 1597-99 is probably my favorite example of chiaroscuro. It is challenging to paint a portrait in and of itself but to reproduce the mirror image in water is over the top in skill level.

"David with the Head of Goliath," was among his early works.  The dramatic use of highlights and shadows create the chiaroscuro effect and went on to influence artists like Rembrandt.

Caravaggio was born as Michelangelo Merisi in Italy around 1571. He was orphaned at age 11 when his entire family succumbed to the plague. He apprenticed with a painter in Milan. He moved to Rome, where his work became popular for the tenebrism technique he used, which used shadow to emphasize lighter areas. His career, however, was short-lived. Caravaggio killed a man during a brawl and fled Rome. He died not long after, on July 18, 1610.
Caravaggio's world was violent and, at times, unstable. His birth came just a week before the Battle of Lepanto, a bloody conflict in which Turkish invaders were driven out of Christendom. Many of his great works show an intensity of emotion and curiosity. His subjects seem to tell a story and draw you in unlike few others can do.

According to writer Andrew Graham-Dixon, author of the 2011 biography "Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane," the artist's troubled adult years stemmed directly from that traumatic loss of his family. "He almost seems bound to transgress," Dixon writes. "It's almost like he cannot avoid transgressing. As soon as he's welcomed by authority, welcomed by the pope, welcomed by the Knights of Malta, he has to do something to screw it up. It's almost like a fatal flaw." Was the the consummate tortured artist? Unlike so many other artists that grew up in families with money and the ability to tolerate their artist children, Caravaggio had nothing like that. He fell in with some painters and became an apprentice. Lucky fate for young Caravaggio.

His ability to assist other painters kept his belly full as he wandered throughout the region. Eventually he started selling his own works. Not only was he good, he was a prolific painter. He could turn out a work in two weeks. Leave it to the church to snap him up. His work soon caught the attention of Cardinal Francesco del Monte, who adored Caravaggio's paintings and quickly set him up in his own house, with room, board and a pension.  I guess they overlooked his attention to young chubby boys with little clothing.  His assistant shows up in many of his works and it is speculated that he was Caravaggio's lover.

When he was awarded the commission for the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, they probably didn't expect him to populated biblical scenes with the prostitutes, beggars and thieves whom he had encountered on the streets of Rome. The commission gave him the freedom to lift traditional religious scenes and cast them with his own dark interpretation. Some paintings created so much angst that he had to repaint them.

Something tells me he murmured some obscenities under his breath when he had to redo a masterpiece.  He was known to drink and gamble with a hot temper.  His masterpieces were probably more representational of suffering and emotion than the dulled-down reverent pieces the patron would have preferred.

His temper got the best of him in 1606 when he killed a Roman pimp.  He became a fugitive.  Luckily for him, there was no social media to get the info around the world in a nanosecond.  However, it caught up with him eventually.   The killing was not the end of his violent outbursts.  He attacked a man a couple years later and the man retaliated by disfiguring his face.  He tried to make it back to Rome to ask the Pope for a pardon but died before he got there.

One of Caravaggio's more shocking paintings from this period is "Resurrection," in which the painter revealed a less saintly, more bedraggled Jesus Christ escaping from his tomb in the middle of the night. This scene was no doubt inspired by events in Caravaggio's own life. By this time, Caravaggio had become a nervous wreck, always on the run and in constant fear for his life, so much so that he slept with his clothes on and with a dagger at his side.

For many years the exact cause of Caravaggio's death had been shrouded in mystery. But in 2010, a team of scientists who studied Caravaggio's remains discovered that his bones contained high levels of lead—levels high enough, they suspect, to have driven the painter to insanity. Lead poisoning is also suspected of having killed Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh.

Ok, as always, I tie things back to tattooing.  Modern day tattooing also benefits from the use of chiaroscuro techniques.  Take a look at these two tattoos and you can see the use of chiaroscuro technique.  One is using color while the other is achieved with only black ink.  Chiaroscuro is not a word that I hear many tattoo artists use but it is there in these examples.   Good tattoo artists make use of the negative space which means they use the underlying skin to create the highlight rather than use a light colored ink.   It makes the tattoo more readable and less damage to the skin.

Hope you enjoyed getting to know a little about chiaroscuro.  I am certain you will see examples all around you.