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Lesson
Lesson 2. Sfumato and Leonardo's soft light
Understand the sfumato technique and learn to tell soft, smoky transitions from sharp contrast.
Haze instead of sharp lines
Sfumato
If chiaroscuro is sharpness and contrast, sfumato is its opposite. Sfumato (from the Italian sfumato, “hazy,” “like smoke”) is a technique in which the transitions between light and shadow, and between figure and background, are made so smooth that not a single sharp line is visible. Outlines seem to melt into the air.
The master of sfumato is Leonardo da Vinci. The “Mona Lisa” has no sharp edges anywhere: the corners of her mouth and eyes slip softly into light shadow, and that is exactly why her smile seems elusive — we can't say for sure whether she is smiling or not. Light and shadow there don't fight; they flow into each other.
Sfumato gives a sense of living air, softness, mystery. In real life we really don't see sharp black outlines around objects — they appear only in diagrams. Leonardo was the first to make the edge of a face dissolve as it does in reality, and that is what makes the portrait feel truly alive.
Lesson notes
Sfumato
If chiaroscuro is sharpness and contrast, sfumato is its opposite. Sfumato (from the Italian sfumato, “hazy,” “like smoke”) is a technique in which the transitions between light and shadow, and between figure and background, are made so smooth that not a single sharp line is visible. Outlines seem to melt into the air.
The master of sfumato is Leonardo da Vinci. The “Mona Lisa” has no sharp edges anywhere: the corners of her mouth and eyes slip softly into light shadow, and that is exactly why her smile seems elusive — we can't say for sure whether she is smiling or not. Light and shadow there don't fight; they flow into each other.
Sfumato gives a sense of living air, softness, mystery. In real life we really don't see sharp black outlines around objects — they appear only in diagrams. Leonardo was the first to make the edge of a face dissolve as it does in reality, and that is what makes the portrait feel truly alive.