Georges Seurat, the Post Impressionist painter who invented Pointillism, also devised a drawing technique that focused exclusively on tone and its ability to render form. The highlights were hatched and stippled in white to complete the wrinkled form of the old man with his luxuriant beard. Dürer built up his dark tones in several layers of cross-hatched brushstrokes, graduating their shades from the natural black of the ink, through three or four paler concentrations to the mid-tone of the primed background. It was done some years after his trip to Italy on paper that he primed with a grey-violet wash for the mid-tone as he no longer had access to his Italian source of Venetian Blue paper. The mid-tones were provided by the color of the Venetian Blue paper that he found in Northern Italy.ĭürer's drawing of the 'Old Man aged 93' (1521) is a superbly skilled brush drawing that used the 'chiaroscuro' technique to render tone. The light tones were established with white gouache, an opaque form of watercolor. The dark tones were created with black ink. While on a visit to Venice in 1505, he adopted a Renaissance drawing technique called 'chiaroscuro' (Italian for 'light-dark') which used three basic tones to create the illusion of form: They emerge from the darkness into a radiant light that illuminates every circumference, wrinkle and ragged edge in exquisite detail.Īlbrecht Dürer, the great German artist from Nuremberg, made many tonal studies of heads, hands and drapery as preparatory sketches for his paintings. We know this as the same objects are repeated identically in other works. They have been meticulously painted from individual studio studies to maximize their realism. They have been mathematically arranged in a hyperbolic curve to add some ingenuity to their composition. Every element is geared to a visual appreciation of the objects: The painting is simply a virtuoso demonstration of the Cotan's ability to imitate reality in spellbinding detail. There is no symbolic message in this work.

The framework of their background is a 'cantarero', a 17th century larder cut from the cold stone wall where the produce is hung from strings to prevent it from spoiling. Cotan's fruits and vegetables gently emerge from the darkness into bright sunlight, emphasizing their strikingly naturalistic detail. Juan Sanchez Cotan's 'Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber' reverses the tonal contrasts of Caravaggio's still life: dark objects against a light background have now become light objects against a dark background.

Animal crossing text tones