Shadow and Light in Art

Light has an immediate effect on me. A grey winter day can exacerbate my depression.
Conversely, a bright morning or a honey-coloured ray of sunshine can make the day easier. Light always has an effect. It changes how we see the world and how we feel in it.

This also applies to painting. There, it is an essential part of the visual language. It directs the gaze, conveys meaning, creates closeness or distance. It can bring a face out of the darkness. It can recede and envelop an entire scene in silence. And sometimes light is the protagonist of a picture, as a supporting act or drama queen. I would like to take you on a brief journey through the history of light in art – and talk about how it finds its way into the picture in the first place.

Early Forms: From Golden Ground to Daylight

Before painters began to depict light in its physical reality, it was primarily a symbol. In Byzantine and Gothic art, gold backgrounds shone as the embodiment of the supernatural. Light did not come from a source within the painting, but was an omnipresent presence.

One exception was the halo, which was painted around the head or body of blessed persons to express their aura or – in a metaphor of light – their radiance. But even here, the light did not come directly from a physical source; it was inspired by concept and tradition; it remained a symbol. 

Architecture also played with the idea of symbolic light. Many churches and cathedrals face east so that the first light of day falls on the most sacred area of the church – the altar. Coloured glass windows break it into bright beams. An effect that not only transforms the space but also underlines the meaning of light. It stands for the divine, for enlightenment, hope and resurrection.

In the early Renaissance, however, light also became a tool for organising space and making the things in it appear more credible. As humans increasingly focused on their earthly surroundings, light in painting was no longer exclusively divine radiance. It fell on faces, gestures and rooms – and made them the actual subject of the representation.

Painters such as Masaccio and Piero della Francesca began to use light sources and shadows to make figures and spaces appear more three-dimensional. Light now had a source and a direction, and shadows followed a logical pattern.

Light as a Stage – Chiaroscuro and Tenebrism

The use of light in the Renaissance was often objective. Painters wanted to understand how it works physically and how it shapes volume, space, and depth. Light followed a logical source, shadows were consistent, and with their help, the impression of three-dimensionality was created.

In general, the observation of nature was at the forefront. The aim was to show the world as it is. Although light often still had a certain symbolic meaning, especially in religious scenes, the main interest was in how it was depicted.

From the High Renaissance onwards, the depiction of light became more theatrical. It was directed where it was needed to emphasise the message of the painting– Leonardo and Titian were the first masters of lighting. In the Baroque period – fuelled in part by the Counter-Reformation, which turned back to the supernatural – it regained its symbolic function. But now painting built on Renaissance knowledge: artists knew exactly how light falls and how shadows are formed, and they consciously used this knowledge to charge it with emotion and symbolism.

The result was not just correct lighting, but lighting as a stage direction – it guided the action, the interpretation and the viewer's emotions. It served the message – dramatic climaxes, strong contrasts, light as a sign of mercy, truth, revelation or moral decision. Painters such as Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi and Georges de La Tour used light to stage scenes as if on a stage.

The Counter-Reformation was a reaction to the Reformation, which began with Martin Luther in 1517 and quickly spread across large parts of Europe. The Catholic Church lost not only believers, but also political influence, economic power and the trust of many people.

The Council of Trent (1545–1563) stipulated in its decrees that art should be a means of reaffirming the Catholic faith. Sermons and theology could only reach those who could read or were willing to listen. Paintings, however, had an immediate effect – they could also appeal to illiterate people or those without a deeper education on an emotional level.

The council's decisions emphasised that religious paintings should be clearly understandable: no confusing allegories, no excessive nudity, no ambiguity that distracts from the faith. Instead: clear messages, recognisable good and evil figures, unambiguous action.

Dramatic lighting, grand gestures and dynamic compositions were intended not only to inform, but also to ‘grab’ the viewer emotionally. Light played a key role in this: it could appear as a divine intervention in the action or rescue a figure from the darkness.

Techniques such as chiaroscuro (the modelling of volume through the contrast of light and dark) and the even more extreme tenebrism, in which almost everything is in deep shadow and only individual figures or objects stand out as if in spotlight, provided a visual language for this. It was a combination of technical mastery and deliberate effect that hardly any other medium could achieve so directly.

But such effective visual means do not stop at denominational boundaries. The visual impact of chiaroscuro and tenebrism was so convincing that it was also adopted outside the Catholic world, albeit with different themes and objectives.

Dramatic lighting also played a central role in the Golden Age of Dutch painting (c. 1600–1680). Artists such as Rembrandt, Gerrit van Honthorst and Carel Fabritius used similar techniques for completely different pictorial content. Dramatic lighting was not a divine sign. It was atmosphere, tension and psychological depth.

There were simple reasons why this style of painting arrived somewhat later among Protestants, especially in the Netherlands. In the 17th century, Italy was the undisputed centre of the European art world. Many Dutch painters travelled to Italy, saw Caravaggio's works or those of his followers, the Caravaggisti, and brought ideas and techniques home with them.

There, they transferred the effect of light to their secular subjects: genre scenes, still lifes, portraits, historical paintings... The focus here was no longer on religious edification, but on the staging of everyday life, morality or bourgeois representation.

The light of grace became once again the light of observation.

Materials & Methods: How is Light Painted?

Deep, luminous light often arises in the underpainting. A first layer establishes the light-dark rhythm. The ‘value hierarchy’ – i.e. the relationship between different levels of brightness – is one of the most important tools in painting for depicting light credibly and effectively. It has much more influence on the effect of a picture than the colour itself. This is easy to imagine when you look at a picture as a black-and-white photo: all that remains are the light-dark gradations.

Only when the gradient from light to shadow is right does colour come into play. Different glazes add depth and colour. Some pigments can absorb light over time. Umber and bitumen, for example, were popular in the 17th century for deep shadows where rich darkness was desired.

• Umber (raw umber, burnt umber) is a natural earth pigment containing iron and manganese salts. It is fairly stable, but can become somewhat dull and matt in very thick glazes.
• Bitumen (also called asphalt) is not a mineral, but a naturally occurring earth pitch. Artists used it because when wet, it produces a beautiful, transparent, warm dark tone – ideal for deep shadows or glazes over light areas.

However, bitumen dries extremely slowly, often remains slightly sticky and tends to sag or crack over the decades. It darkens and loses transparency. What was originally a velvety, translucent darkness can now appear as a flat, almost black spot. The glaze no longer reflects light from the substrate back to the viewer.

Chemically stable earth colours such as ochre and sienna (raw or burnt), on the other hand, are very lightfast. They hardly change over centuries and retain their ability to transmit and reflect light. This is why shadows painted with them typically appear more vivid – you can still see nuances even in dark areas.

Showing Edges

In addition to value hierarchy and colour, edge logic also plays an important role. It subtly controls where the eye rests and how we perceive a shape. Hard edges occur when light-dark or colour contrasts meet abruptly. They immediately attract the eye because our eyes react to strong contrasts. In light-dark painting, hard edges are often placed where attention is to be drawn.

A soft edge allows shapes to recede, creates atmosphere or a sense of movement. Transitions between light and shadow are created by glazing or gentle blending. In portrait painting, soft edges can be particularly flattering, while in landscapes they create depth and haze.

Sometimes shapes deliberately merge with the background. These are known as lost edges. A deliberate break in style is used to tone down parts of a motif or allow shadow areas to dissolve into the darkness. The eye fills in the missing lines itself. Because not everything is revealed immediately, tension is created.

In contrast to this are found edges, i.e. clearly defined, easily visible transitions. These can be hard or soft, as long as they are clearly legible. You can clearly see where a shape ends.
An image appears more lively when hard, soft and lost edges are used in a varied way, in the right edge rhythm. Otherwise, everything appears rigid and striking, or blurred and unfocused.

Even in the shadows, everything is rarely black. Our environment scatters light in every direction. Reflected light ensures that shapes in the shadows retain their volume and do not appear cut out. They do not come directly from the main light source, but are reflected back from another surface.

Reflected light is brighter than the shadow but darker than the light side. It is often slightly cooled or changed in colour, depending on the surface from which the light is reflected. Skin, fabric or metal breathe through reflected light, and the darkness does not appear dull.

How we can Read Light

In painting, light is never just a physical effect; it also conveys mood, symbolism and compositional function. Paying close attention to how it is used helps us to delve deeper into the painting and understand it.

• Where does the light come from?
• Where does a shape break softly/hardly? Why?
• What lives in the shadows?
• Who does the light in the picture belong to? A figure, an object, an idea?

Such observations bring us closer to the inner logic of the painting. How is a painting constructed and why? Every decision – where light is placed, what disappears in the shadows, which edges are emphasised or lost – can reveal something about the painter's intention: what was important to him, what he wanted to conceal or emphasise. Light is a storyteller. It reveals who the main character is, whether it is a thriller or a love story, and where the drama takes place.

Impressionism: Painters of Light

For centuries, artists had worked in studios lit only by candlelight or lamps. Electric light did not yet exist, and windows alone were not sufficient on cloudy days or in the evenings.
This light was selective, warm and quickly faded. It was bright right next to the candle, but quickly became dark in the surrounding area.

For a long time, dramatic lighting was not only a creative decision, but also an everyday experience. However, the light inside was relatively constant and controllable. Painters could find shadows and highlights identical for hours or days and work on them at their leisure.

However, the industrial revolution in the 19th century brought new mobility and technology: the invention of the paint tube made it possible to take colours outdoors. The expansion of the railway network quickly brought Parisian artists to the coasts of Normandy or to the hills, river landscapes and villages of Île-de-France.

The ability to paint on site changed art. A haystack that lies in the light in the morning and in the shade in the evening requires a different kind of attention – away from the object and towards its lighting. Impressionist painters no longer wanted to show primarily what was depicted, but how it was shaped by light at a particular moment.

The first steps in this direction had already been taken in Romanticism and Late Romanticism. Caspar David Friedrich's ‘metaphysical twilight’ gave landscapes an almost spiritual charge, while William Turner allowed forms to blur in the splendour and turbulence of the weather in his late works. Both shifted the focus away from clearly defined forms and towards atmosphere.

Both painted light mainly in the studio or from memory. The artists of Impressionism were no longer dependent on this.

En plein air, the light was alive, changeable and almost impossible to control. Sunlight changes in intensity and direction within minutes, clouds pass by, colours shift. This forced artists to make quicker decisions, use shorter, freer brushstrokes and observe more directly. They captured the light as it actually was at that moment – including its fleetingness and unpredictability.

At the same time, advances in optics and colour theory changed the way light and colour were viewed. Black as a mixing colour largely disappeared—instead, darkness was created using refracted, complementary colours, which appeared more vivid.

Claude Monet, one of the central representatives of this movement, took the search for fleeting light particularly far. He did not paint motifs just once, but again and again – at different times of day, in fog, rain, sunrise, or winter light. His series of Rouen Cathedral, haystacks, and water lilies are not repetitions in the classical sense, but investigations into how form and mood change when the light changes. For Monet, the motif was almost a pretext—the real subject was light itself.

Beyond France, too, the view of light in painting was changing. In Germany, Max Liebermann was one of the most important Impressionists. He used the bright daylight that floods scenes in gardens, on beaches or in summer houses to create an atmosphere of lightness and openness. In his work, light is not dramatically refracted, nor does it dissolve forms. Instead, it shimmers through the painting like something alive.

Later, pointillism also emerged from the logic of impressionism. Painters such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac placed dots of colour next to each other so that the motif – and thus also the light – only blended in the eye of the beholder. Light no longer originated on the palette, but in the act of seeing itself.
Vincent van Gogh took up this idea, but broke away from the strict pointillist technique and instead used short, powerful strokes that condensed colour and light into vibrant surfaces.

A final glimmer

Every era and every artist has understood light differently. As a symbol, a dramatic tool, a conveyor of mood, an object of study, or a play of colour and time. Of course, light has long since found new stages. Photography and film often direct the gaze differently than painting, but they also like to draw inspiration from the old masters and their use of light.
Which light inspires you the most? The golden evening light in Monet's paintings, the meaningful candlelight in de La Tour's works, the dramaturgy of Caravaggio? Is there a painting whose light has fascinated you for a long time?