Art Term of the Week

Chiaroscuro:

 

The use of light and dark in strong contrast to suggest forms in artwork.  From Italian chiaro=bright and oscuro=dark, literally meaning light-dark.  The Baroque period used it heavily and Tenebrism-chiaroscuro to the extreme-emerged as a style.  

Artists: Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Joseph Wright of Derby, Giovanni Baglion

Do you want to suggest an “Art Term of the Week”? Email me at theravenandthewritingdesk@hotmail.com and submit your art term with definition and example artists.

Leonardo says,

 

“And if you, O poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness and less tedious to be understood. And if you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting. Now which is the worse defect? to be blind or dumb? Though the poet is as free as the painter in the invention of his fictions they are not so satisfactory to men as paintings; for, though poetry is able to describe forms, actions and places in words, the painter deals with the actual similitude of the forms, in order to represent them. Now tell me which is the nearer to the actual man: the name of man or the image of the man. The name of man differs in different countries, but his form is never changed but by death.” _ Leonardo da Vinci

This drawing (a sketch for my bigger work “The Artist’s Table”) is done in silverpoint, which is basically a little silver rod. Leonardo himself used it, as did a lot of other Renaissance artists. For more info on silverpoint I’ve posted these links:

Silverpoint Web
Wikipedia: Silverpoint

 C.nick Arach