How to Use chiaroscuro in a Sentence

chiaroscuro

noun
  • Just be wary of displaying too many deep, dark chiaroscuro paintings.
    — Tyler Lynch, Popular Mechanics, 18 Nov. 2022
  • Their works share a melancholy woven from chiaroscuro — the play of light and shadow.
    — Cate McQuaid, BostonGlobe.com, 11 July 2023
  • The chiaroscuro style is evident in the masquerade ball scene.
    — Dessi Gomez, Deadline, 16 Aug. 2024
  • In place of bright, acidic colors and translucent atmospheres, there’s lots of chiaroscuro.
    — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 5 Dec. 2023
  • And in the perfect chiaroscuro, this is a woman who thrives on the frisson of impossible love.
    — Soraya Roberts, Longreads, 8 June 2019
  • This is a certain style of photography called chiaroscuro, which used to fascinate me as a kid.
    — Isobel Thompson, A-LIST, 6 Sep. 2017
  • Our real seders here in Berlin are typically less chiaroscuro, but no less crowded.
    — Molly Crabapple, The New York Review of Books, 7 Apr. 2020
  • The author has a gift for creating chiaroscuro portraits, capturing both light and dark.
    — Jennifer Senior, New York Times, 29 June 2016
  • Her mother was gripping her hands, leaning over her body like a chiaroscuro, shooing my friend George and me out of the room.
    — Deborah Copaken, The Atlantic, 7 Jan. 2020
  • Trump’s right side, partially draped in shadow, creates a touch of chiaroscuro, light reckoning with the dark.
    — Karen Heller, Washington Post, 25 Aug. 2023
  • Looking for a little chiaroscuro to light up your Thanksgiving weekend?
    — Booth Moore, The Hollywood Reporter, 20 Nov. 2017
  • Shifting levels of brightness are key to reproducing the chiaroscuro of an image.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 11 Sep. 2020
  • Finally, the sun broke through the gray clouds, casting the rows of Italian cypress into stark chiaroscuro.
    — Matt Ortile, Condé Nast Traveler, 13 Dec. 2021
  • In fact the lighting is very painterly, with sharp chiaroscuro bursts whenever a moment needs an exclamation.
    — Rod Stafford Hagwood, sun-sentinel.com, 9 Oct. 2019
  • If the sun has gone down, so should your overhead lighting, according to Terzian, who like to light lots of candles for a chiaroscuro effect.
    — Caroline Hatchett, Robb Report, 8 Nov. 2022
  • The chiaroscuro in Rembrandt’s painting of Titus evokes that ambivalence.
    — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 17 June 2023
  • Wedged between a series of chiaroscuro nude portraits from middle age, Fox Solomon writes of her teen-age years and early adulthood.
    — Christina Cacouris, The New Yorker, 24 Sep. 2024
  • In that sense, black and white — the chiaroscuro, the contrast, the gradation of grays — became a visual metaphor for the moral dilemmas at the center of the story.
    — Georg Szalai, HollywoodReporter, 18 Feb. 2026
  • His canny placement of the camera for long shots and use of chiaroscuro lighting in close-ups make just about every scene, all of them filmed in widescreen, a cinematic study.
    — David Mermelstein, WSJ, 8 June 2021
  • Within the multi-level retail complex, the range of lighting goes from moody shadow to dramatic chiaroscuro and bright sunlight.
    — Alastair Gordon, miamiherald, 12 May 2017
  • One person looks at it and, with the cold admiration of a connoisseur, analyzes the colors, the chiaroscuro, the background.
    — Vladimir Nabokov, The New Yorker, 8 Nov. 2019
  • Aubrey is able to paint realistically, and understands chiaroscuro.
    — Heide Janssen, Oc Register, 15 Mar. 2026
  • Old fashioned filmic techniques like split diopter shots, iris wipes, and chiaroscuro lighting add another layer of maximalist flare to the whole affair.
    — Marya E. Gates, IndieWire, 9 Sep. 2025
  • The movie’s slow panning shots, acidic color grading, and aggressive chiaroscuro form an interactive filter that anyone can adopt.
    — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker, 1 Sep. 2023
  • Jewel tones and chiaroscuro styling don’t seem like an obvious fit for a story that earnestly imagines a little boy having his heart injected with gasoline.
    — Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire, 21 June 2024
  • The boys in Led Zeppelin, to take one instance, are said to have found their patterns of musical chiaroscuro, the movement from soft to loud and back, in her work.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 29 July 2022
  • Beneath the rib vault of the exquisite cloister, sculpted marble columns and round apertures paint a stunning natural chiaroscuro.
    — Washington Post, 29 Oct. 2021
  • The dark negative spaces in this loose arrangement contrast with the light flowers, echoing Hopper’s chiaroscuro.
    — Lindsey Taylor, WSJ, 20 July 2018
  • In effect, Wright was the first indigenous artist to introduce chiaroscuro to the oil-painting scene that was expanding in the Britain around him.
    — Julian Bell, The New York Review of Books, 25 Apr. 2026
  • Among them was Rachel Ruysch, whose delicate, bountiful bouquets populate urns and dark niches—a play of chiaroscuro in the style of the times.
    — Jessi Jezewska Stevens, The New Yorker, 8 May 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'chiaroscuro.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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