"Chiaro-oscuro" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if she touched an inner spring of the girl's nature, touched it electrically. Elfrida leaned forward consciously with shining eyes. "Truly am I, Janetta? Ah—to-night! Well, yes, perhaps to-night, I am. It is an effect of chiaroscuro. But what about always—what about generally, Janetta? I have such horrid doubts. If it weren't for my nose I should be satisfied—yes, I think I should be satisfied. But I can't deceive myself about my nose, ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... change of scene. Had followed two weeks with cousins fifty miles away near Lida, Ohio, and a day's stop-over in Cincinnati allowed by her railroad ticket. But six months after, in the circle of glow from a tablelamp that left the corners of the room in a chiaroscuro kind of gloom, there were again noises of wings rustling and of water lapping and the old stricture of the throat. Across the table, a Paisley cover between them, Mr. John Burkhardt, his short spade of beard already ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... confidence, one night, with a very red face drew back the curtain from his grand "Fall of Chapultepec," and watched him with a lean and hungry look, Knowles, who knew no more about painting than a gorilla, walked about, looking through his fist at it, saying, "how fine the chiaroscuro was, and that it was a devilish good thing altogether." "Well, well," he soothed his conscience, going downstairs, "maybe that bit of canvas is as much to that poor chap as the Phalanstery was once to another fool." And so went on through the gas-lit streets into his parishes in cellars and ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... hints as to technical procedure, but there were at least portraits in a number of houses in the city and district, and from these and from prints after the Masters, of which Deuchar, an etcher himself, evidently possessed examples, Raeburn no doubt derived much instruction as to design, the use of chiaroscuro and the like. It has also been suggested with considerable likelihood that mezzotints after portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds had a considerable ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... coloured his canvas with exquisite delicacy and with a distinction of harmonies that came very near to Whistler's. Now he confines himself to bistre, black and white, to evoke those dream pictures, true images of souls, which make him inimitable in our epoch and go back to Rembrandt's chiaroscuro." Colour went by the board at the last, and the painter was dominated by expression alone. His gamut of tones became contracted. "Physical magnetism" is exactly the phrase that illuminates his later methods. Often cavernous ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... entering Venice by this water-path from Mestre, before the Austrians built their causeway for the trains. Some of the rare scraps of fresco upon house fronts, still to be seen in Venice, are left in Cannaregio. They are chiaroscuro allegories in a bold bravura manner of the sixteenth century. From these and from a few rosy fragments on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fabbriche Nuove, and precious fading figures in a certain courtyard ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... have here, in a work by one of our most eminent artists, an homage to the genius of him 'who touched nothing which he did not adorn:' and the charming subject is handled in the most delicious manner by Mr. Smith. The chiaroscuro is admirable: the impasto is perfect. Perhaps a very captious critic might object to the foreshortening of Moses's left leg; but where there is so much to praise justly, the Pall Nall Gazette ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "pastern" and "stifle" and "wethers" and "girth" and "hock," to the boy, seemed to establish, beyond all question, the intellectual greatness of the one who used them just as words of many syllables sometimes fix for older children the position on the intellectual heights of those who use them. "Chiaroscuro," "cheiropterous," "eschatology," and the "unearned increment"—who, in the common, every day, grown up, world, would dare question the artistic, scientific, religious, or political, knowledge of one who could ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... allowed for watching expression. Still less does he depend on details of murder or ghastliness of death; there is no blood, no stabbing or cutting, but there is an awful substitute for these in the chiaroscuro. The scene is the outer vestibule of a palace, the slippery marble floor is fearfully barred across by sanguine shadows, so that our eyes seem to become bloodshot and strained with strange horror and deadly vision; a lake of life ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... his future, in which he lived, like all men of dominant ambition, far more than he lived in his present. It was a future brilliant, secure, brightening in its lustre, and strengthening in its power, with each successive year; a future which was not to him as to most wrapped in a chiaroscuro, with but points of luminance gleaming through the mist, but in whose cold glimmering light he seemed to see clear and distinct, as we see each object of the far-off landscape stand out in the air of a winter's noon, every thread that he should gather up, every distant point ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... did not get the name of the girl I had seen there in the firelight. What did remain—and that not wholly to my pleasure, so distinct it seemed—was the picture of her high-bred profile, shown in chiaroscuro at the fireside, the line of her chin and neck, the tumbled masses of her hair. These were things I did not care to remember; and I hated myself as a soft-hearted fool, seeing that I ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... for which purpose sheep and cattle and household utensils are introduced. He confines himself to a bold, straightforward imitation of familiar objects, united, however, with pleasing composition, colour, and chiaroscuro. His colours, indeed, sparkle like gems, particularly the greens, in which he displays a brilliancy quite peculiar to himself. His lights are boldly infringed on the objects, and are seldom introduced except on prominent parts of the figures. ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... authority for stating that Mr. Darley has also engaged to furnish, to a print publisher in this city, twelve designs of large size, representing prominent scenes in American history. They are to be sketches in chiaroscuro, which will afterward be engraved in mezzotint. The first of these designs represents The Massacre of Wyoming. The point of time chosen by the artist, is the first demonstration made by the savages against the settlement, on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the romantic idealists with their pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and teachers' conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... picked colours, unless Nature is personal. If the end of the world were mere darkness or mere light it might come as slowly and inevitably as dusk or dawn. But if the end of the world is to be a piece of elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro, then there must be design in it, either human or divine. The world, through mere time, might grow black like an old picture, or white like an old coat; but if it is turned into a particular piece of black and white art— then there ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... promontories, the valleys, the melting bosoms, the sketches? How render the thickets of foam, blendings of mountains and dreams? The indescribable is everywhere there—in the rending, in the frowning, in the anxiety, in the perpetual contradiction, in the chiaroscuro, in the pendants of the cloud, in the keys of the ever-open vault, in the disaggregation without rupture, in the funereal tumult caused by all ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... simple ambition to wash Chick's face, but the boundary line had proved troublesome. Whether she sharply defined it, or attempted artistic effects in chiaroscuro the result was equally unsatisfactory. Myrtella was nothing if not thorough; before she finished with Chick, he was standing with his feet in a bucket, as clean and wet and naked as ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... itself, and is painted with trembling truth of touch and delicate tenderness of feeling. We feel it to be destitute of profound suggestiveness and massive thought, but its verse is solemnly dignified, its imagery is chastely grand, and a rich chiaroscuro rests like a tropical night upon the whole. Besides the stanzas we have already alluded to, it has some of those brief touches which show ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... and they were one and all pedantic imitators, who added to the exaggerations of the Italian style a certain German coarseness, the result of which was a bastard style of painting, still inferior to the first, childish, stiff in design, crude in color, and completely wanting in chiaroscuro, but not, at least, a servile imitation, and becoming, as it were, a faint prelude to the true Dutch art ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... and indecision of the objects offered by his surroundings and nearly unknown here. The broken and wandering touch suggested by the jagged stones of a crumbling castle is not that which one should begin by cultivating. Breadth and firmness in form, color and chiaroscuro are attainments to be first held in view, and never to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... accompanied by, or superposed upon, a spectrum of dark lines, in producing which sodium and iron have an obvious share; and certain bright rays, noticed by Secchi with imperfect appliances as enhancing the chiaroscuro effects in carbon-stars, came out upon plates exposed by Hale and Ellerman in 1898 with the stellar spectrograph of the Yerkes Observatory.[1408] Their genuineness was shortly afterwards visually attested by Keeler, Campbell, and Duner;[1409] but no chemical ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... remember that even enthusiastic devotion to art will not give inspiration, and that the most thorough science cannot communicate charm. Though the Caracci invented fresh attitudes and showed complete mastery of the human form, their types remained commonplace. Though their chiaroscuro was accurately based on that of Correggio, it lacked his aerial play of semitones. Though they went straight to Titian for color, they never approached Venetian lucidity and glow. There was something vulgar ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... man is brought in contact with this earth—the beauties of sex, of strength, of activity, of grandeur of form; all, that is, in which Greek art excels: their ideal of beauty was altogether effeminate. They prudishly despised the anatomic study of the human figure, of landscape and chiaroscuro. Spiritual expression with them was everything; but it was only the expression of the passive spiritual faculties of innocence, devotion, meekness, resignation—all good, but not the whole of humanity. Not that ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... beautiful, is true; and this, indeed, is the real modernite of art: but these conditions are exactly what we cannot be always sure of, as we stroll down Piccadilly in the glaring vulgarity of the noonday, or lounge in the park with a foolish sunset as a background. Were we able to carry our chiaroscuro about with us, as we do our umbrellas, all would be well; but this being impossible, I hardly think that pretty and delightful people will continue to wear a style of dress as ugly as it is useless and as meaningless as it is monstrous, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... see to these persons. As I was saying, my lard, the crimson velvet suit, about thirty-five guineas. By-the-by, that coat ours? I thought so—idea grand and light—masses well broken—very fine chiaroscuro about the whole—an aristocratic wrinkle just above the hips—which I flatter myself no one but myself and my friend Mr. Cooke really do understand. The vapid smoothness of the door dummy, my lard, should be confined to the regions of the Strand. Mr. Elliot, where ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... eminence would sanction; while even those respecting which some doubt may exist in their application to consummate practice, are yet perfectly determinable, so far as they are needed to guide a beginner. It may, for instance, be a question how far local colour should be treated as an element of chiaroscuro in a master's drawing of the human form. But there can be no question that it must be so treated in a boy's study of a tulip ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... pictures are excellent in regard to harmony of colouring. Correggio and Barocci have left few, if any, finished drawings behind them. And in the Flemish school, Rubens and Vandyke made their designs for the most part either in colours or in chiaroscuro. It is as common to find studies of the Venetian and Flemish painters on canvas, as of the schools of Rome and Florence on paper. Not but that many finished drawings are sold under the names of those masters. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... Prisoners can volunteer. They are at discretion; they would die, if we did NOT lift our finger!" thus I suppose Winterfeld would rejoin, if necessary;—and that, in the Winterfeld-Rutowski Conferences, the thing had probably been kept in a kind of CHIAROSCURO by ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... not surprising that, having given up plot, these writers escape from other restraints also. The more energetic among them revel in expression, and it seems to make little difference whether it is the exquisite chiaroscuro of Chicago they are describing, or spots on a greasy apron. The less enthusiastic are content to be as full of gritty realistic facts as a fig of seeds; but with all of them everything from end to beginning, from bottom ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... growing dark, but the exhibition had been so successful that day, and the crowd was still so large, that the hunchback was loath to desist. At a sign from him, Jan put his colored chalks into a little pouch in front of him, and drew in powerful chiaroscuro with soft black chalk and whitening. These sketches were visible for some time, and the interest of ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... picture.] One does not comprehend all this, Monsieur, without well studying. I was in train to interpret for Ma'moiselle the chiaroscuro. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... symbols or emblematic attitudes for the interpretation of the artist's thought. Andrea Pisano's figure of Hope, raising hands and eyes toward an offered crown, seems but a repetition of the motive expressed by Giotto in the chiaroscuro frescoes of the Arena chapel.[72] Owing to similar causes, drapery, which in Greece had served to illustrate the structure or the movement of the body it clothed, was used by the Italian sculptors ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... significance. Hopes stifled by fear, yearnings that we dare not recognise, stand forth in new glory. Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... only amusement during my martyrdom—if this misery can be said to possess such alleviatings—had been the study of feet, pantaloons, and skirts. The trousers in this case detained my observation no time. They were but the darkest corner of the chiaroscuro of a Rembrandt—the mellow glow of gold was ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... was a fine type of the peasant. His features might, in the strong chiaroscuro of the candle-light, have stood as model for some church fresco of a St. Peter. His dress was of grey country homespun, cut in a long coat, and girded by a many-coloured arrow-pattern sash, and on his feet he wore a ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... and the partial obscurity—I might have almost written, the incomparable chiaroscuro—of the Evangelistic writings have added to the value of our Lord's character as an ideal, not only in the case of Christians, but as bringing the Christ-ideal within the reach and comprehension of ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... not flooded earth with eternal sunlight. He knew that shadows were needed to chasten the spirits of his children, and teach them to look to him for the renewal of all blessings. But shadows are fleeting, and every season of gloom has its morning star. Oh, I thank God that his own hand arranged the chiaroscuro of earth!" She spoke earnestly; the expression of her eyes told that her thoughts had traveled into the dim, weird land of futurity. Beulah offered no comment; but the gloom deepened on her brow ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... have been lost in a crowd of anonymous equals. Rembrandt, indeed, perhaps the greatest genius of them all, is a typical ruin of his age. For, except in a few of his later works, his sense of form and design is utterly lost in a mess of rhetoric, romance, and chiaroscuro. It is difficult to forgive the seventeenth century for what it made of Rembrandt's genius. One great advantage over its predecessor it did enjoy: the seventeenth century had ceased to believe sincerely in the ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Dr. Sibley, he wrote a pleasant little essay on "Taste," you know, with a few additional notes on chiaroscuro; and then there was the learned Dr. Ambrose, who wrote quite a pretty little treatise ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... in an atelier where a number of art and music students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music, Rembrandt's works, pictures, Waldteufel, wall paper, Chopin ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... is so important for you to be grounded securely in these first elements of pictorial treatment, that I will be so far tedious as to show you one more instance of the relative intellectual value of the pure color and pure chiaroscuro school, not in Dutch and Florentine, but in English art. Here is a copy of one of the lost frescoes of our Painted Chamber of Westminster;—fourteenth-century work, entirely conceived in color, and calculated for decorative effect. There is no ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... of that city; yet before Luther there lived men, such as the scholar Erasmus, who have been appropriately named Reformers before the Reformation. So, too, Cavour's cautious policy paved the way for Garibaldi's brilliant victories. Once again, Leonardo da Vinci is named as the inventor of chiaroscuro, yet he was preceded by Fra Filippo Lippi. And in similar manner, in music, certain men are associated with certain forms. Haydn, for example, is called the father of the quartet; close investigation, however, would show that he was only ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... in that altitude—and stroked his eyelids with touches as bland as caresses of a pretty woman's fingers. He was sensible of drowsiness, a surrender to fatigue, to which the motion of the motor car, swung seemingly on velvet springs, and the shifting, blending chiaroscuro of the magic night were likewise conducive. So that there came a lessening of the tension of ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... be hazardous to specify his exact industry. Coarsely followed, it would have merited a name grown somewhat unfamiliar to our ears. Followed as he followed it, with a skilful reticence, in a kind of social chiaroscuro, it was still possible for the polite to call him a professional painter. His lair was in the Grand Hotel and the gaudiest cafes. There he might be seen jotting off a sketch with an air of some inspiration; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... arts of chiseling marble and laying colors on the canvas?—Certainly. I should think all that might be arranged in an Academy system very simply. You would have first your teaching of drawing with the soft point; and associated with that, chiaroscuro: you would then have the teaching of drawing with the hard or black point, involving the teaching of the best system of engraving, and all that was necessary to form your school of engravers: you would then proceed to metal work; and on working in metal you would found your school ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... woman—never forgot the honour she had borne in being a great painter's wife and companion for half-a-dozen years. Perhaps, good as she was, she grew rather to brandish this credit in the faces of the cloth-workers and their wives; to speak a little bigly of the galleries and the Academy, of chiaroscuro and perspective, of which the poor ignoramuses knew nothing: to be obstinate on her dignity, and stand out on her gentility far before that of the attorneys' and the doctors' wives;—and all this though she had been, as you may remember, the least ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... of Amitaba; in raised bosses and rings upon the armlets or necklets of the Bodhisattvas and Devas, and in a hundred other manners. The pigments chosen to harmonize with this display were necessarily body colors of the most pronounced lines, and were untoned by any trace of chiaroscuro. Such materials as these would surely try the average artist, but the Oriental painter knew how to dispose them without risk of crudity or gaudiness, and the precious metal, however lavishly applied, was distributed over ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... his troubled journey through life, and of his childhood the records are scanty. Doubtless, his youthful imagination was stirred by the sights of the city, the barges moving slowly along the canals, the windmills that were never at rest, the changing chiaroscuro of the flooded, dyke-seamed land. Perhaps he saw these things with the large eye of the artist, for he could not have turned to any point of the compass without finding a picture lying ready for treatment. Even when he was a little boy the fascination of his surroundings may have ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... decorous, tiny Bethel of a particular people. Its internal arrangements are equally sedate, condensed, and snug. A calm homeliness, a Quakerly simplicity runs all through it. Nothing glaring, shining, or artistically complex is visible; neither fresco panellings, nor chiaroscuro contrasts, nor statuary groups adorn its walls: if any of these things were seen the members would scream. All is simple, clean, modest. The walls, slightly relieved on each side by two imitation columns, are calmly coloured; the ceiling, containing a floriated centre piece, is ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... say—in relation to itself; and that was values—but restricted values. The whole picture was arranged on the basis of arbitrary lighting, which entered into the scheme of composition of that picture. This is not values, but what is generally understood by the older writers when they speak of "chiaroscuro." The modern painter deals little with chiaroscuro. It is almost obsolete as a technical word. Arbitrary arrangement of light and shade in a picture is not usual nowadays, and consequently the word which expressed it ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... its peculiar proverbs, sayings, and catch-words, but also idiomatic phrases which constitute a characteristic chiaroscuro, if not colour. The Gipsies in England have of course borrowed much from the Gorgios, but now and then something of their own appears. In illustration of all this, I give the following expressions ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... all respects between the repose of the Eastern, and activity of the Western mind, which we shall have to trace out completely in the inquiry into the nature of Gothic.] while the bright coloring and disregard of chiaroscuro cannot be regarded as imperfections, since they are the only means by which the figures could be rendered clearly intelligible in the distance and darkness of the vaulting. So far am I from considering them barbarous, that I believe of all works of religious art whatsoever, these, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... work the first day. But I saw something more in nature than general effect, and I thought it worth my while to give it in the picture. There was a gorgeous effect of light and shade; but there was a delicacy as well as depth in the chiaroscuro which I was bound to follow into its dim and scarce perceptible variety of tone and shadow. Then I had to make the transition from a strong light to as dark a shade, preserving the masses, but gradually softening off the intermediate parts. It was so in nature; the difficulty ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... lights, without shade, without composition, as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour. To furnish colour I melted down the very substance of my own soul. I went about with my brush, touching up and toning down; a very pretty chiaroscuro you'll find in my track! Sitting here in this old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the misty verge of what might have been! I should have been born here and not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things they'd ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... blue and white paper in stripes adorned with festoons, and a thousand plump chairs, couches, and luxurious settees covered with linen of the same pattern, and with a bow-window commanding the prospect, and gloomed with limes that shade half each window, already darkened with painted glass in chiaroscuro, set in deep blue glass. Under this room is a cool little hall, where we generally dine, hung with paper to ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... What results from the study of these two circular sketches in marble is that, although Michelangelo believed all sculpture to be imperfect in so far as it approached the style of painting, yet he did not disdain to labour in stone with various planes of relief which should produce the effect of chiaroscuro. Furthermore, they illustrate what Cellini and Vasari have already taught us about his method. He refused to work by piecemeal, but began by disengaging the first, the second, then the third surfaces, following ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... him about 700 woodcuts, most of them distinguished by that spirit and freedom which we admire in the works of his supposed master. His principal work is the series of 135 prints representing the triumphs of the emperor Maximilian I. They are of large size, executed in chiaroscuro, from two blocks, and convey a high idea of his powers. Burgkmair was also an excellent painter in fresco and in distemper, specimens of which are in the galleries of Munich and Vienna, carefully and solidly finished in the style ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the older picture-fancier. He talks, if possible, even more learnedly, discoursing of balance, tone, chiaroscuro; he despises innovations, judges in accordance with names; is of course convinced the present can bear no comparison with the past; will look through a whole gallery, and finally be captivated by some well-executed ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had declared that "the designing of the holy images was not to be left to the invention of artists, but to the approved legislation and tradition of the Catholic Church." But now the Church had to take a great deal that it had not bargained for. Perspective, chiaroscuro, picturesque contrast and variety, and all that belongs to the show of things, without regard to what they are,—this is now the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... down again, and slept in the light of the flickering fire. One giant arm was thrown around his head, and the other hung down in careless grace; the great chest was heaved up, and the head thrown back; the seamed and rugged features seemed more stern and marked than ever in the chiaroscuro; and the whole man was a picture of reckless strength such as one seldom sees. Tom had dozed and had awoke again, and now sat thinking, "What a terrible tough customer that fellow would be!" when suddenly ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... all external nature, shunning affectation and exaggeration, and striving after pathos, and purity of feeling, with patient endeavor and utter simplicity of heart. For on this labor must depend the success of his work with the public. Artists may praise his color, drawing, or manipulation, his chiaroscuro, or his lines; but the clearness, truth, and sentiment, of his work ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... manner of good things from Britain or from the United States. These older-fashioned houses, built, I presume, on the Spanish model, are not without a certain stateliness, from the depth and breadth of their chiaroscuro. Their doors and windows reach almost to the ceiling, and ought to be plain proofs, in the eyes of certain discoverers of the 'giant cities of Bashan,' that the old Spanish and French colonists were nine or ten feet high apiece. On the doorsteps sit Negresses in gaudy print dresses, with stiff ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... figure; it is also concerned with what is called the modelling, and the treatment of surfaces such as the draperies, the hair, the fleshy portions and those beneath which the bony structure comes to prominence; in painting it may be applied to the chiaroscuro and colour. Reynolds' remarks on the Venetians in his Eighth Discourse well illustrate this ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... always possible to subscribe to Ruskin's flowing judgments; but I gratefully borrow the one with which he sums up thus, in a lecture on wood-engraving: Holbein does not give many gradations of light, the speaker says, "but not because Holbein cannot give chiaroscuro if he chooses. He is twenty times a stronger master of it than Rembrandt; but therefore he knows exactly when and how to use it, and that wood-engraving is not the proper means for it. The quantity of it ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... it seems to me, is to exaggerate almost immeasurably the reach of Hawthorne's relish of gloomy subjects. What pleased him in such subjects was their picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, their chiaroscuro; but they were not the expression of a hopeless, or even of a predominantly melancholy, feeling about the human soul. Such at least is my own impression. He is to a considerable degree ironical—this is part of his charm—part even, one may say, of his brightness; but he is neither bitter nor ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... and colour was exactly on a par with his feeling for form. He belongs to the poets of chiaroscuro and the poets of colouring; but in both regions he maintains the individuality so strongly expressed in his choice of purely sensuous beauty. Tintoretto makes use of light and shade for investing his great compositions with dramatic intensity. Rembrandt interprets ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... sense of wonder. Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery, in which men's faces turned black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside), seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days, this world where men took off their beards and their spectacles and ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... recognition of the character of her assigned disguise. She had had visions of something very splendid, something almost barbaric in its richness—had nursed a day-dream of herself flaunting radiantly through the chiaroscuro of the moonlight fete like ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... landscapes have an agreeable air of simple nature. His compositions, though they have not much eloquence or grandeur, have abundance of force and truth; the local colours are well observed, the flesh-tints are fresh and brilliant, and his chiaroscuro and perspective are unexceptionable. He is said to have finished a great number of pictures; but his genuine works are somewhat rare and valuable—many of those which are called originals being copies either by the sons of Bassano or by others. Bassano's style varied considerably ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... be questioned, but the reason is sound. An entirely successful man is the most pitiful object in the universe. Not only has he nothing to look forward to, but he has nothing to look back upon. Having no regrets, no shadows, in his life, he has no chiaroscuro, no depth, no solidity in his picture. It is painted in the flat. "Regret," says George Moore, to change the figure a little, "is like a mountain top from which we survey our dead life, a mountain top on which we pause and ponder." He has no point of view, then, either. So after all the words, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... craftsmen, and its only artist of repute is Bernardo of Parenzo, who was much employed in his day; pictures by him are preserved in the Accademia at Venice, the Doria Gallery, Rome, in the Louvre, and at Modena. He studied at Padua with Mantegna, under Squarcione, and executed frescoes and chiaroscuro arabesques in the cloister of S. Giustina in that city. When the Austrians converted the convent to military uses the paintings were plastered over, and, although again uncovered in 1895, they were found to be in a ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... rapturously. You would have thought, to hear me, that for drawing, breadth, finish, color, composition, chiaroscuro, and every other merit that a painting could possess, this particular chef-d'oeuvre excelled all the masterpieces ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... by Van Eyck, the inventor, as it is generally supposed, of oil painting. Let us respect these fathers of the art. Let us pardon the stiffness of their composition, the formality of their figures, the inelegance of their draperies, the hardness of their outlines, and the want of chiaroscuro;—for, in spite of all these failings, there is a truth to nature, and a richness of coloring, which always attract and win. The picture in question is the Virgin Mother in her Domestic Retirement, surrounded by her family, a comely party of young ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... appear in the pictures painted by Fra Angelico in Florence, probably in recognition of the benefits bestowed by Cosimo on the monks of San Marco; moreover, we do not think the work could have been done at Fiesole after the first visit to Rome in 1452, because the figures, weak in chiaroscuro, are still treated as if they were enlarged miniatures, and do not show the character of his later works. On the other hand the picture of the Osservanza in Mugello displays the whole power of the artist, and may ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... painter of Siena and much esteemed, deserved to carry off the palm from those who came many years after him, since in the pavement of the Duomo of Siena he made a beginning in marble for the inlaid work of the figures in chiaroscuro, wherein to-day modern craftsmen have made the marvels that are seen in them. He applied himself to the imitation of the old manner, and with very sane judgment gave dignified forms to his figures, which he fashioned very excellently in spite of the difficulties ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... Turner was "out of nature"; Ruskin tried to show that the pictures were full of facts, but treated with poetical license. The critic pronounced Turner's colour bad, his execution neglected, and his chiaroscuro childish; in answer to which Ruskin explained that Turner's reasoned system was to represent light and shade by the contrast of warm and cold colour, rather than by the opposition of white and black which other painters used. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... partnership may probably have been the "Baptism of Christ,'' for the Florentine Compagnia dello Scalzo, a performance of no great merit, the beginning of a series, all the extant items of which are in monochrome chiaroscuro. Soon afterwards the partnership was dissolved. From 1509 to 1514 the brotherhood of the Servites employed Andrea, as well as Franciabigio and Andrea Feltrini, the first- named undertaking in the portico of the Annunziata three frescoes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of those we hate or love we find what we most desire or fear to see. Which is an assertion equalling in its wisdom and chiaroscuro the most famous sayings of the most foolish philosophers that the world ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... not colourists make illuminations and not paintings. Painting, properly speaking—unless one wants to produce a monochrome—implies the idea of colour as one of its fundamental elements, together with chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective. Proportion applies to sculpture as to painting. Perspective determines the outline; chiaroscuro produces relief by the arrangement of shadow and light in relation to the background; colour gives the appearance ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... pickaxe looks dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty. But the man he is supposed to be studying sees the difference between them exactly as a clerk sees the difference between a ledger and an edition de luxe. The chiaroscuro of the life is inevitably lost; for to us the high lights and the shadows are a light grey. But the high lights and the shadows are not a light grey in that life any more than in any other. The kind of man who could really express ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of the Frate, but we will give her the entire credit of the colouring, which is extremely crude; the contrasting blues and yellows are in inharmonious tones, the shading harsh, and the whole picture wanting in chiaroscuro. The Corsini Gallery, Florence, has a Virgin and Child ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... placed being important. The elaborate preparation for the story-telling; the grouping of them as a whole, in contrast with the greater story he put as their contrast and foil; the solemn gloom, the deep chiaroscuro of this framing, painted like a miniature; the artful way in which he prepares for his lieta brigata the way out of the charnel-house: these are the real 'Decameron.' The author presents it in a prelude which has for its scope only to give the air of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... caricaturist; and the large etchings on steel, with which between '40 and '45 he illustrated Ainsworth's gory romances, indicated a power of grouping, a knowledge of composition, a familiarity with mediaeval costume, and a command over chiaroscuro, which astonished and delighted those who had been accustomed to regard him only as a funny fellow,—one of infinite whim, to be sure, but still a jester of jests, and nothing more. Unfortunately, or fortunately, as the case might be,—for the rumor ran ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Florence cathedral are all placed under a flat canopy of the same form, the columns being elongated, twisted, and enriched with mosaic patterns. The reader must at once perceive how vast is the importance of the difference in system with respect to this member; the whole of the rich, cavernous chiaroscuro of Northern Gothic being dependent on the accumulation ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin |
