One of the most vital things in art is the way the viewer's attention is directed. What is crucial? What does the artist need to get across?
The chiaroscuro effect is one of the best ways to highlight crucial details. The eye is directed to the light in a mostly dark canvas and vice versa. Above is Dutch painter Aert de Gelder's imagined portrait of Esther and Mordecai. Esther's determined posture and the paper she holds in her hand take center stage in this picture.
I saw this today at the Rhode Island School of Design museum and didn't want to tear myself away. de Gelder. de Gelder, one of Rembrandt's last pupils, was apparently not Jewish himself but his depiction of Jewish figures is both vivid and sympathetic, unusually so for the time. If you look closely even the writing appears to be Hebrew.
2 comments:
Paintings done using a chiaroscuro effect have always impressed me as the most realistic images of how people would have appeared at night especially before the advent of electricity. There are any number of very fine examples but you're right that this one is particularly beautiful because it's understated.
I'm guessing too the writing would have been Hebrew. He likely had some Jewish friends, perhaps even a Rabbi or two.
You make an interesting point of chiaroscuro painting representing how people looked to each other before the dawn of electricity. In the developed world, at least, light is cheap at any time of day. Or at least easy. But early chiaroscuro paintings were before all that. In many cases it was before even readily available gas-powered lighting. So bits of illumination were precious. This is understated, yes, while also being dramatic.
Tangentially, I recently learned that Baruch Spinoza was one of the philosophers who most inspired Nietzsche. Puts him in a different perspective.
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