Light in painting

[72] Between the 14th and 15th centuries Italian painters used supernatural-looking lights in night scenes to depict miracles: for example, in the Annunciation to the Shepherds by Taddeo Gaddi (Santa Croce, Florence) or in the Stigmatization of Saint Francis by Gentile da Fabriano (1420, private collection).

[109] In turn, Piero della Francesca used light as the main element of spatial definition, establishing a system of volumetric composition in which even the figures are reduced to mere geometric outlines, as in The Baptism of Christ (1440-1445, The National Gallery, London).

He carried out scientific studies of perspective and optics (De prospectiva pingendi) and in his works, full of a colorful luminosity of great beauty, he uses light as both an expressive and symbolic element, as can be seen in his frescoes of San Francesco in Arezzo.

In the Altarpiece of Saint Job (c. 1485, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice), Bellini brought together for the first time the Florentine linear perspective with Venetian color, combining space and atmosphere, and made the most of the new oil technique initiated in Flanders, thus creating a new artistic language that was quickly imitated.

These effects also influenced Giorgione, as well as some Mannerist painters such as Lorenzo Lotto, Dosso Dossi and Domenico Beccafumi.At the end of the High Renaissance, in the middle of the 16th century, Mannerism followed, a movement that abandoned nature as a source of inspiration to seek a more emotional and expressive tone, in which the artist's subjective interpretation of the work of art became more important, with a taste for sinuous and stylized form, with deformation of reality, distorted perspectives and gimmicky atmospheres.

In The Assumption of the Virgin (1526-1530), painted on the dome of the cathedral of Parma, he created an illusionistic effect with figures seen from below (sotto in sù) that would be the forerunner of Baroque optical illusionism; in this work the subtle nuances of his flesh tones stand out, as well as the luminous break of glory of its upper part.

In addition to Ribera, in Spain, Caravaggism had the figure of Juan Bautista Maíno, a Dominican friar who was drawing teacher of Philip IV, resident in Rome between 1598 and 1612, where he was a disciple of Annibale Carracci; his work stands out for its colorism and luminosity, as in The Adoration of the Shepherds (1611-1613, Museo del Prado, Madrid).

One of its best representatives was Willem Kalf, author of still lifes of great precision in detail, which combined flowers, fruits and other foods with various objects generally of luxury, such as vases, Turkish carpets and bowls of Chinese porcelain, which emphasize their play of light and shadow and the bright reflections in the metallic and crystalline surfaces.Classicism emerged in Bologna, around the so-called Bolognese School, initiated by the brothers Annibale and Agostino Carracci.

In the evolution of his style we can perceive a profound study of pictorial illumination, of the effects of light both on objects and on the environment, with which he reaches heights of great realism in the representation of his scenes, which however is not exempt from an air of classical idealization, which shows a clear intellectual background that for the artist was a vindication of the painter's craft as a creative and elevated activity.

Finally, after his trip to Italy between 1629 and 1631, he reached his definitive style, in which he synthesized the multiple influences received, with a fluid technique of pasty brushstrokes and great chromatic richness, as can be seen in La fragua de Vulcano (1631, Museo del Prado, Madrid).

In this century, one of the movements most concerned with the effects of light was Venetian vedutismo, a genre of urban views that meticulously depicted the canals, monuments and places most typical of Venice, alone or with the presence of the human figure, generally of small size and in large groups of people.

[136] Among his first production, in which he was mainly in charge of the elaboration of cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Barbara, El quitasol (1777, Museo del Prado, Madrid) stands out for its luminosity, which follows the popular and traditional tastes in fashion at the court at that time, where a boy shades a young woman with a parasol, with an intense chromatic contrast between the bluish and golden tones of the light reflection.

[139] The first style of the century was Romanticism, a movement of profound renewal in all artistic genres, which paid special attention to the field of spirituality, fantasy, sentiment, love of nature, along with a darker element of irrationality, attraction to the occult, madness, dreams.

Turner had a predilection for violent atmospheric phenomena, such as storms, tidal waves, fog, rain, snow, or fire and spectacles of destruction, in landscapes in which he made numerous experiments on chromaticism and luminosity, which gave his works an aspect of great visual realism.

A more mature work is Memorial Image for Johann Emanuel Bremer (1817, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin), a night scene with a strong symbolic content alluding to death: in the foreground appears a garden in twilight, with a fence through which the rays of the moon filter; the background, with a faint light of dawn, represents the afterlife.

He specialized in peasant scenes, often in landscapes set at dawn and dusk, as in On the Way to Work (1851, private collection), Shepherdess Watching Her Flock (1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) or A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville (1871, Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

To achieve maximum realism, they carried out numerous investigations, as in the painting The Rescuer (1855, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), by John Everett Millais, in which a fireman saves two girls from a fire, for which the artist burned wood in his workshop to find the right lighting.

The almost photographic detail of these works led John Ruskin to say of William Holman Hunt's The Wandering Sheep (1852, Tate Britain, London) that "for the first time in the history of art the absolutely faithful balance between color and shade is achieved, by which the actual brightness of the sun could be transported into a key by which possible harmonies with material pigments should produce on the mind the same impressions as are made by the light itself.

In his early works, such as The Potato Eaters (1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), the influence of Dutch realism, which had a tendency to chiaroscuro and dense color with thick brushstrokes, is evident; here he created a dramatic atmosphere of artificial light that emphasizes the tragedy of the miserable situation of these workers marginalized by the Industrial Revolution.

Slevogt assumed the fresh and brilliant chromatism of the Impressionists, although renouncing the fragmentation of colors that they made, and his technique was of loose brushstrokes and energetic movement, with bold and original light effects, which denote a certain influence of the baroque art of his native Bavaria.

The term luminism was introduced by John Ireland Howe Baur in 1954 to designate the landscape painting done in the United States between 1840 and 1880, which he defines as "a polished and meticulous realism in which there are no noticeable brushstrokes and no trace of impressionism, and in which atmospheric effects are achieved by infinitely careful gradations of tone, by the most exact study of the relative clarity of nearer and more distant objects, and by an accurate rendering of the variations of texture and color produced by direct or reflected rays".

[168] After a period of training, in the 1890s he began to consolidate his style, based on a genre theme with a technique of rapid execution, preferably outdoors, with a thick brushstroke, energetic and impulsive, and with a constant concern for the capture of light, on which he did not cease to investigate its more subtle effects.

Heirs to a large extent of Fortuny, the members of this school sought to faithfully reflect the luminous effects of the surrounding landscape, in harmonious compositions that combined verism and a certain poetic and idealized vision of nature, with a subtle chromaticism and a fluid brushstroke that was sometimes described as impressionist.

Moreau was still trained in romanticism under the influence of his teacher, Théodore Chassériau, but evolved a personal style in both subject matter and technique, with mystical images with a strong component of sensuality, a resplendent chromaticism with an enamel-like finish and the use of a chiaroscuro of golden shadows.

[174] In Italy, it is worth mentioning Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, formed in the divisionist environment, but who evolved to a personal style marked by an intense and vibrant light, whose starting point is his work Lost Hopes (1894, Ponti-Grün collection, Rome).

With precedents in the figures of Edvard Munch and James Ensor, it was formed mainly around two groups: Die Brücke (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Emil Nolde) and Der Blaue Reiter (Vasili Kandinski, Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee).

[179] Cubism (1907-1914) was based on the deformation of reality by destroying the spatial perspective of Renaissance origin, organizing space according to a geometric grid, with simultaneous vision of objects, a range of cold and muted colors, and a new conception of the work of art, with the introduction of collage.

Joan Miró reflected in his works a light of magical and at the same time telluric aspect, rooted in the landscape of the countryside of Tarragona that was so dear to him, as is evident in La masía (1921-1922, National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.), illuminated by a twilight that bathes the objects in contrast with the incipient darkness of the sky.

[194] Figuration returned again with hyperrealism – which emerged around 1965 – a trend characterized by its superlative and exaggerated vision of reality, which is captured with great accuracy in all its details, with an almost photographic aspect, in which Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Don Eddy, John Salt, and Ralph Goings stand out.

Individual artists such as Jeff Koons, David Salle, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl or Miquel Barceló stand out, as well as various movements such as the Italian trans-avant-garde (Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria, Mimmo Paladino), German Neo-Expressionism (Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz, Sigmar Polke), Neo-Mannerism, free figuration, among others.