What Art Form Was First Used to Demonstrate Light and Shadow

Although cast shadows lurk almost everywhere in the visual arts, they often skid past audiences unnoticed. That'due south unfortunate, since every shadow tells a story. Whether painted, filmed, photographed, or generated in existent time, shadows provide vital information that makes a representation engaging to the middle. Shadows speak virtually the shape, book, location, and texture of objects, besides as almost the source of light, the time of twenty-four hour period or flavor, the quality of the atmosphere, and so on.

*Reattaching a Shadow, Peter Pan, Disney Studios, 1953. Figure 1.1, Grasping Shadows: The Night Side of Literature, Painting, Photography, and Film (OUP 2017) by William Chapman Sharpe.*

But as the famous example of Peter Pan's amputated shadow reveals, shadows depicted in artworks can be arbitrarily shaped, placed, and even cut off past their creators. Therefore, beyond offering concrete information, shadows take much to tell the states on a social and psychological level. Consciously or not, whenever we see shadows we "read" them (and their creators' intentions) in a cultural context that lends the shadows power or denies their substance, causing them to seem prophetic or threatening or willful or wispy. In the course of a dozen images, this timeline shows how some of the key meanings of cast shadows have adult over the centuries.

1. Since classical times, artists, scientists, and philosophers have argued about the value of shadows. The ancient Greeks were the get-go artists to use bandage shadows, as they developed a "geometry of the lite" that located objects in relation to a consistent calorie-free source. Mistrusting the fashion that shadows helped such painters to deceive the eye, Plato insisted that shadows mislead people almost the truthful nature of reality. In his Apologue of the Cavern (375BCE), Plato gear up a shadow-substance opposition that has dominated Western thinking about shadows ever since.

Jan Saenredam (printmaker) and Cornelis van Haarlem (artist), Plato's Allegory of the Cave, 1604. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
two. As if to challenge Plato'due south reasoned dismissal of shadows, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder asserted in his Natural History (79 CE) that fine art was born when a immature woman named Dibutades traced the shadow of her lover on a wall, by the light of a lamp. Since the lover was almost to get out on a long journeying, the shadow image not just became the commencement human-made representation, it likewise became an virtually magical substitute for his presence. While Plato thought that shadows were dangerously fake, Pliny suggested that they could exist romantically true, every bit if to capture a person's shadow was to capture office of his vital essence.

Joseph Benoit Suvée, The Invention of the Art of Cartoon, 1793. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
3. The story of Dibutades was highly popular in the 18th Century, when information technology reinforced the faddy for a new form of shadow-capture, silhouettes. In English, cutting-paper silhouettes were showtime known as Shadowgraphs or Shades, since they were often made by tracing a person's shadow. Silhouettes exploit one of the key features of the shadow, its dark, mysterious interior, into which viewers can project whatsoever details imagination can provide.

Thomas Holloway, A Certain and Convenient Car for Drawing Silhouettes, 1792. Effigy 2.17, Grasping Shadows: The Dark Side of Literature, Painting, Photography, and Film (OUP 2017) past William Chapman Sharpe.
iv. Meanwhile, after a dormant menstruation in medieval times, Renaissance artists returned to the Greco-Roman shadow and adult its apply in relation to the emerging fine art of perspective. Shadows became more accurately shaped and placed, even as unwritten rules governed their use and then that they would not impinge too greatly on the homo effigy. In Masaccio'due south The Tribute Money (1425), for instance, cast shadows cover the basis but never obscure the human form.

Masaccio, The Tribute Money, Brancacci Chapel of the basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, 1425. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
5. In the outset painting to make a shadow its primary subject, Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow (1427-1428), Masaccio made sure that the transformative shadow of St. Peter falls around and under the figures that it touches with its heaven-sent ability. Similar many villainous shadows later to come, the holy shadow has a special power that emanates from its source, but the Renaissance painter will non let the shadow dominate the work pictorially.

Masaccio, St. Peter Healing the Sick with his Shadow, 1427–1428. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
6. From the Renaissance onward, about painted shadows serve to make objects seem more "real" in book and placement, simply Rembrandt was a pioneer in giving the shadow psychological weight. In an early self-portrait he depicts himself with his eyes in shadow, every bit if to bear witness how his very vision is embedded in the chiaroscuro that makes his paintings and then dramatic.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, 1629. Public domain via Wikimedia Eatables.
7. Subsequently the Renaissance, the Western world adapted so well to the idea that artistically rendered people need shadows that the absence of a personal shadow could crusade a nifty commotion. Illustrated by many artists, Adelbert von Chamisso'due south story of Peter Schlemiel, the man who sold his shadow (1814), became a big hit in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Since Peter'south acquaintances would take zippo to do with a man who had no shadow, information technology became clear from the story that having a shadow was a sign of humanity, a signal of full participation in human being life.

George Cruikshank, Peter Schlemihl Selling His Shadow, 1827. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
eight. Merely only a few decades later, the first stand-solitary shadows of humans appeared in fine art, independent of anybody to cast them. It was equally if the shadow alone could now do the work of the substance-shadow couple. It was William Collins who discovered in his painting Rustic Civility (1833) just how visually effective a "mere" shadow could be, introducing a powerful narrative chemical element at the same time. Hither children open up a gate for their social "betters," in the form of a horseman who represents the English language land gentry.

William Collins, Rustic Civility, 1833. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Used under Fair Utilise via Wikimedia Commons.
nine. The advent of photography was initially regarded as a matter of "fixing a shadow." Henry Fox Talbot explained his process in 1839 by saying that, using chemical science, he had constitute a way to capture "the most transitory of all things, a shadow." The way photographs "drew" with light connected them in the public mind with Pliny'southward story of tracing shadows on a wall. The poet Elizabeth Barrett wrote to a friend in 1843, that a photo was similar "the very shadow of the person lying there stock-still forever!"

Clementina Hawarden, Isabella Grace, 5 Princess Gardens, 1861—1862.Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Effigy ii.18, Grasping Shadows: The Dark Side of Literature, Painting, Photography, and Film (OUP 2017) by William Chapman Sharpe.
10. As picture palace adult, motion-picture show directors speedily picked upwards the atmospheric and dramatic shadow-vocabulary used by painters since the time of Caravaggio and Rembrandt. In classics such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, the High german Expressionists fabricated shadows into active participants in the drama. "Murder by shadow" presently became an integral part of cinematic lore.

The Shadow's Prey, Nosferatu, directed by F. West. Murnau, 1922. Used nether Fair Use.
11. More recently, artists have used actual shadows fabricated by high-powered lights to construct interactive street fine art in which people can encounter their ain shadows in settings that reveal just how conflicting yet too reassuring shadows tin be.

Mario Martinelli, Meeting the Shadow, 2013. Used under Fair Use.
12. Wherever art goes, advertising soon follows. Some of the latest forms of advertising use immaterial shadows to sell tangible goods. If in gimmicky art the shadow plays, on today'due south billboards the shadow pays.

Ellis Gallagher and Pablo Powers, "The Lighter Side of Night," 2011. Used under Fair Use.