Meaning of sfumato | Babel Free

Definitions

A painting technique, prominent during the Italian Renaissance, involving the application of subtle layers of translucent paint, blurring the transition between colors, tones and often objects and creating the illusion of depth.

uncountable, usually

Equivalents

Examples

“Another quality which was adopted from Leonardo, and of which the Florentines were especially enamoured, was the ‘sfumato’ system—the imperceptible softening of the transitions in half-tints and shadows.”

“1960, Helmut Ruhemann, Leonardo's Use of Sfumato, in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 1, British Society of Aesthetics, page 233, The interpretation of ‘sfumato’ is equally wrong. In ‘sfumato’ there is no blurring of the outlines which delineate the contours of figures and there is no blending or diminution of the definition of forms or for that matter any mellowing of colours.”

“It could be said that sfumato is less exact than line and that its forms are less precisely defined, but with these apparent omissions comes a sense of atmosphere. By casting its shadow over concrete form, sfumato dissolves it.”

“In baroque painting, sfumato is the blurring of outlines and colors amongst objects, as clouds and mountains, or the sea and the sky. Sfumato allows baroque subjectivity to create the near and the familiar among different intelligibilities, thus making cross-cultural dialogues possible and desirable.”

“2018, Lena Redman, Knowing with New Media, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature, page 234, No smeared sfumatos—blurred lines and borders—or anaemic chewing of emotions, just forcefully chopped slabs of substance.”

“2022, Ellen Jones, Robin Myers (translators), Ave Barrera, The Forgery, Charco Press, unnumbered page, As I was saying, I was worried because my sfumatos didn't look anything like they did in the original.”

CEFR level