6. Chiaroscuro
Before we begin to discuss Caravaggio’s work in detail, it is important to understand what made the work so innovative and popular in late-16th-century Italy. As previously mentioned, Caravaggio’s realistic approach to art was in part a reaction against the artificiality of Mannerism, perhaps influenced by Archbishop Borromeo’s tastes. Although depicting biblical scenes in the present day had been a technique common in medieval art, Caravaggio’s incredible ability also to depict these episodes realistically was a tremendous shock to 16th-century viewers, whose exposure to the technique was limited to the consciously-stylised, 2-D renderings of earlier periods in impoverished churches.
But Caravaggio’s main innovation was his use of a technique known as chiaroscuro (‘light-dark’), which he refined into his own iteration, tenebrism. Chiaroscuro painting involves the bold contrasting of light and darkness to create a dramatic and emphatic whole. It lends itself especially well to realist painting such as Caravaggio’s because the play of light and shadow creates a sense of volume in the rendering of three-dimensional figures. Think, for instance, of the difference between a colour and a black-and-white photograph. The latter gives greater clarity to physical features and creates a generally more sombre mood than the former.
Tenebrism, Caravaggio’s version of chiaroscuro, extends the violent clashes of light and darkness of the earlier method. In tenebrism, the darkness rather than the light becomes the dominant part of the picture’s composition, and makes the image seem to exceed its two-dimensional medium. In the picture above, look at the window shutter, and the leg-muscles of the man at the table’s centre. The tenebrism of the painting also adds to the drama of the moment depicted: here, Jesus points at Matthew from the right of the picture, accompanied emphatically by the beam of light, inspiring the eventual-apostle to follow him.