CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Sfumato
Soft, smoky shading in which tones pass into one another without visible lines or borders, perfected by Leonardo da Vinci.
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About
Sfumato takes its name from the Italian for smoke, fumo. It describes modelling so gradual that there is no point where light turns to shadow and no hard contour closing a form. Leonardo da Vinci achieved it with many very thin, translucent layers of oil paint, some shown by scientific study to be only a few thousandths of a millimetre thick, applied over long periods.
In the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1483–86), faces and hands dissolve softly into a dark grotto. His followers in Milan, among them Bernardino Luini and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, copied the manner closely, and Correggio and Giorgione adapted it to warmer, atmospheric painting. In the 19th century Jean-Jacques Henner revived its glowing, blurred flesh against dark grounds. Look along a jaw, a cheekbone or the edge of a sleeve, where the form fades rather than stops.
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