Lighting Techniques in Art
The human mind is only capable of sight by means of taking light through the eye and interpreting that within the brain. Although people did not fully understand the scientific properties of light until relatively recently, artists throughout time have had the particular challenge of creating an illusion of the existence of light within an art piece. Human sight has an incredible range, feeding the mind images of the surrounding world from near complete darkness to the brightest of sunlight conditions. It is through this range that the world becomes reality, and it is therefore the place of art to attempt to capture this range of light. However, traditional pigments have a very limited range, and therefore the artist must find ways to make the available colors combine to create an illusion that may be interpreted by the viewer as similar to reality. The lighting techniques of painters took a significant turn in the Early Renaissance period which moved their work much closer to nature in appearance through a change in lighting styles, and this continued to influence the art periods that followed.
The Renaissance period was characterized by an increasingly realistic capture of scientific perspective and natural appearance in paintings. In the beginning stages of the Early Renaissance (and also in the art periods prior to the beginning of the Renaissance), artists found it extremely difficult to achieve enough luminance range to show shadows and lighting variations across a single color, especially darker colors. Instead, completely different colors would be used to imply the change. For example, The Madonna would be represented in a blue dress but with a red cloak, because it would be very difficult to show shadows through an entirely blue garment. In other cases, lines on clothing would be done in gold or other colors to imply the folding of the cloth, because the single color would otherwise appear to be very flat and not at all realistically dimensioned. Art using these color-modeling methods to imply the effects of light would inevitably appear fragmented. Da Vinci would, during the Early Renaissance, revolutionize the use of color and light within painting
Leonardo da Vinci was the first painter to truly achieve an accurate-to-nature and scientifically sound appearance to his subjects in regards to lighting techniques. "Leonardo da Vinci was the first artist to use value consistently across colors, achieving tonal unity in which a figure presents a single, swelling, homogeneously generated volume." (Douma) However, his greatest achievement in this area, which would allow for a completely new kind of interpretation of light within the painting, is the technique of chiaroscuro. This technique would strengthen the illusion of depth within the painting, and define the three-dimensional shape in a completely new way. Da Vinci would actually paint a broader range of luminance than what he actually saw in reality, so that the change from dark to light would be most dramatic and vivid within the painted interpretation. This shading would dominate tone more than color itself. For example, his Mary dons the traditional blue dress of styles before, however the actual colors used within that cloth range from black to a blue so light it is almost white, with many shades between, which gives her figure an appearance of great depth and a glossy, almost heavenly dew-covered look. Because of his consistency through his work, however, Mary did not appear to be wearing a multicolored dress, it appears to be a single color with varying levels of light on it. Every colored object in the painting would have a common range of value that would stay consistent for every object that would be the same color. He did use midrange colors, but not the extremes that would become more common in the High Renaissance. Da Vinci said of his work: "If you put [figures] in dark colors, they will be in too slight relief and inconspicuous from a distance... because the shadows of all objects are dark. And if you make a dress dark there is little variety between the lights and shadows, while in light colors there will be greater variety."
In the High Renaissance, Michaelangelo would further the developments made by da Vinci in the realm of shading in painting styles. His use of color contrasts for dramatic effect were very original and used a much more unrealistic range of color to show depth and light, revealing a move away from the attempts to stay very true to natural lighting styles of earlier painters.
For example, Michaelangelo would not only use color ranges from very dark to very light orange on an orange piece of cloth, but would also...
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