Chiaroscuro Underpainting

Overall Infrared Reflectograph of Zurbarán painting		Detail: Infrared of Mary's Robe
By the time Zurbarán became active as a painter, the practice of composing a picture as an arrangement of light and dark areas was becoming dominant in Spain, as it was elsewhere in Europe. The most important characteristic of this new design method was the opaque underpainting of light areas, applied over a dark ground, which together gave the picture a unifying tonal foundation. The initial arrangement of light and dark areas as the basis of a composition is termed chiaroscuro underpainting, a technique whose development is generally associated with Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610) and his followers throughout Europe. Painters working in Spain occasionally mixed this procedure with techniques from earlier Flemish traditions.

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