The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries

An anonymous reader shares a report: Shadows can do some adventurous, sometimes malignant, poetic things: They move, rebel, hide, refuse to be identified, vanish. All these visual aspects provide fertile ground for complex metaphors and narrations. Shadows are so visually telling that it takes little to move into emotionally tinged narratives. But it is the visual aspects that we primarily deal with here, with a special focus on several types of misrepresentations of shadows -- shadows doing impossible things -- that nevertheless reap a payoff for scene layout and do not look particularly shocking.

Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows -- after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics -- are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art. Here, we embark on a journey that takes us through a number of extraordinary pictorial experiments -- some successful, some less so, but all interesting. We have singled out some broad categories of solutions to pictorial problems: depicted shadows having trouble negotiating obstacles in their path; shadow shapes and colors that stretch credibility; inconsistent illumination in the scene; and shadow character getting lost. We also find some taboos, that is, self-inflicted limitations on where or what to depict of a shadow.

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