In the first of these two articles looking briefly at the history of ‘compositional’ chiaroscuro in painting, I traced some early examples from the Renaissance before showing a selection from its heyday between 1590 and 1650. With Caravaggio and those influenced by him gone, chiaroscuro returned to occasional use for special effects rather than lapsing into obscurity.
It still appeared in nocturnes, such as Antoine Watteau’s The Foursome from about 1713. You may have noticed that I’m not a great fan of paintings from this period, but I rather like this for its subtlety, and the details half-hidden in its darkness.
With the Age of Enlightenment, one of its most devoted artists spent much of his career using chiaroscuro to express revelation and discovery. Joseph Wright of Derby’s A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is Put in Place of the Sun from 1766 is one of the best examples of his use of light and darkness, which is both visually stunning and appropriately symbolic.
Chiaroscuro was resurrected by the Romantic and ‘Gothic’ painters who arrived in the late eighteenth century. Their use of it to intensify the mysterious and sometimes downright scary stands in complete contrast to Wright.
Henry Fuseli used chiaroscuro extensively, particularly in his many paintings of the night. One fine example is in The Shepherd’s Dream from 1793, which tells a story of fairy elves bewitching a peasant, from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Later ‘faerie painters’ of the nineteenth century also used chiaroscuro frequently.
Just three years later, the young JMW Turner exhibited his first oil painting at the Royal Academy: a maritime nocturne which features brilliant use of chiaroscuro.
Turner’s Fishermen at Sea from 1796 shows small fishing boats working in a heavy swell off The Needles, on the Isle of Wight, on a moonlit night. Although an outstanding work for such a young artist, Turner was following a vogue for nocturnes which had been established by British and French painters during the late eighteenth century.
Chiaroscuro remained a favourite of more traditional artists during the nineteenth century. Here Karl von Piloty uses it for the scene of an infamous murder in his painting of Seni at the Body of Wallenstein from 1855. This shows the body of the murdered high general Albrecht von Wallenstein in 1634, discovered by his astrologer, Giovanni Battista Seni.
Ary Scheffer used it to great if relatively conventional effect in his painting of Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca de Rimini and Paolo in the Underworld (1855). These two adulterous lovers are seen in Dante’s second circle of hell, providing good grounds for the use of chiaroscuro, which proves highly effective.
More modern paintings during the latter half of the nineteenth century very seldom used traditional chiaroscuro, with its near-black shadows and dazzling highlights. Instead the shadows are more murk than black, and the highlights more modest too.
Jean-François Millet’s L’Angélus (The Angelus), which he completed around 1857-59, reverses the convention of highlit figures against a dark background, to instil sombreness and emphasise the poverty of the couple seen at the end of a day digging potatoes from the poor soil.
Petrus van Schendel combines the romantic glow of candles with haze and murk in his Market by Candlelight of 1865. This has a much narrower tonal range than Caravaggist chiaroscuro, resulting in softness.
Vincent van Gogh’s early social realist painting of The Potato Eaters from 1885 makes very effective use of reduced contrast chiaroscuro, in depicting a poor peasant family eating in their dark cottage.
Of Pierre Bonnard’s many paintings exploring light and its effects, The Lamp from about 1899 stands out for its full-blown chiaroscuro lighting and his elaborate use of reflection in the globe below the light.
Another continuing use of chiaroscuro to the present day is in portraiture, particularly in insightful self-portraits.
Torajirō Kojima’s Self-Portrait 自画像 painted in about 1917 makes him look old, care-worn and anxious, a direct contrast to the effects shown in Gerard van Honthorst’s scenes of revelry in the seventeenth century.
Chiaroscuro isn’t done yet, not by a long way, but has settled as an unusual technique mainly employed for special visual effects – and is perhaps the more marvellous as a result.