Apollodorus (painter) - Effect On Chiaroscuro

Effect On Chiaroscuro

The invention of chiaroscuro is extremely important; not only in the context of art history, but also for the future because it is always evolving and mutating. Apollodorus' development of skiagraphia was only the beginning of a long and wondrous road through art's gradual development. The word chiaroscuro in and of itself is an oxymoron. In Italian, chiaro means light and scuro means dark, ergo the two together symbolize the combination and distribution of light and dark into one to create a more lifelike image. No longer simply used for paintings on canvas of stationary objects, chiaroscuro is used in all types of art, even sculpture, frescoes, and woodcuts. Chiaroscuro is used to produce volume and relief, to unify the objects in a painting, or differentiate them from one another. The simple creation of skiagraphia lead to the invention of diverse techniques that continued to be produced from the times of ancient Greece to Gothic times and then it reached its pinnacle in the Italian Renaissance in 14th- century and even today it continues to be important to artists. In the 15th-century, chiaroscuro was described by Cennino Cennini, a famous Italian painter. He stated that the ideas of gradation between light and dark, skiagraphia, were combined with Medieval techniques known as incidendo and matizando, which are a “layerings of white, brown, or black in linear patterns over a uniform color” to indicate relief and volume. These two were previously used by monks in the illustration of religious manuscripts. The addition of these two techniques to skiagraphia was instrumental in the evolution of chiaroscuro. Giotto, a Florentine painter, and Cimabue, Giotto's teacher, used chiaroscuro in their late Gothic painting as well, by mixing large amounts of white into the painting, therefore creating an easy transition between tones. In frescoes, mosaics, and manuscript illuminations, artists like Master Honore, a French manuscript painter, and Pietro, a painter and mosaic designer active in the Middle Ages, modeled from underneath with black and white space to create brightness in their works. In the end, Apollodorus' master creation after years of mutation, and evolution transformed into something that, though it still resembled the original and served the same purpose, was new and thoroughly necessary to all great works of art.