Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 26))

MODERN CHIAROSCURAL DEFICIENCIES AND
THEIR INFLUENCE ON PICTORIAL ART

IN his cc Art in the Netherlands” and his various books on Italian art,
H. Taine has maintained that the hand of the medieval painter was
largely guided by optical sensations. And following his rather sug-
gestive than conclusive trend of argument we will readily perceive
that the peculiar lighting conditions of those days, the semi-darkness
of the interiors, the play of sunlight dying in the obscurity of shadows,
and the absence of strong artificial lights, have done much to disclose to the
genius of a Titian and a Rembrandt the manifold harmonies of chiaroscuro,
of coloring, modeling and emotion. The tallow-candle, the oil-lamp, the
torch and the open fireplace were the only artificial light appliances known
to the middle ages, and they were all only like solitary rays of light in uni-
versal darkness. Illumine a room at night by putting a candle on the table
or on the floor, and judge for yourself. The effects obtained will no doubt
appear to you as very weird and picturesque. The flickering light is feeble,
the shadows are intensely dark and pronounced, almost crude, and vacillating,
as if engaged in a continual combat with light. The contrasts are startling,
yet not discordant; the vague train of light mingled with the shadows accen-
tuates only a few places with vivid spots, perchance the polished surface of
a piece of furniture, a glass or pewter mug on the table, the collaret or jeweled
belt of some fair lady. The eye is led to noticing gradations of obscurity,
the darkness grows animated with color and form, and we see the objects as
through a glaze of Vandyke brown.
No wonder that the painter of the middle ages, having become sensi-
tive to the beauty of transparent darkness and the brilliant passages of light,
dared to unite the greatest extremes, and show every form and color in its
full strength. The vagueness of chiaroscural effects was the great modifier
which enveloped all adjacent objects in clair obscure and tempered them with
a warm and mellow radiance.
How different are the conditions in our time. There are no more
Scholken or Rembrandt effects. We have succeeded in banishing darkness
from our homes. We have become very sanitary, we want light and air, and
our windows are built on a level with the floor, and through the increased
largeness and transparency of panes the daylight streams in with dazzling
vehemence. It penetrates into the remotest nooks and corners. Even at
dawn the shadows are only vaguely dark, of an uncertain and mixed bluish
gray. Lenbach, the portrait painter, realized this deficiency and found it
necessary to construct a special studio, where the light is only sparingly
admitted through narrow windows, and in which the sitters for his old-mas-
terish interpretations of modern characters are placed far away from the
windows.
The greatest havoc among chiaroscural effects, however, has been played
by modern light appliances. Gas and electric light with their various modifiers

19