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Afterwards he would be strangely silent and drink brandy out of a wine-glass. "Call these knives clean?" It would be Dan's turn. "Yes, I do." Dan would draw his finger across one, producing chiaro-oscuro. "Not if you go fingering them. Why don't you leave them alone and go on with your own work?" "You've just wiped them, that's all." "Well, there isn't any knife-powder." "Yes, there is."
The romance of an unstable and groping theology, full of warm intentions and impossible ideas, he took to be typical of all experience and of all science. In that impressionable age any effect of chiaro-oscuro caught in the moonlight of history could find a philosopher to exalt it into the darkly luminous secret of the world.
Strange notions respecting the origin, the scheme, the design of the universe, flashed in dim chiaro-oscuro through his thoughts, and for a full hour Dick pondered, philosopher-like, on the remote causes and the distant finalities of men and things. An hour full of moans and cries of suffering, then a great silence came, and the whole house seemed to sigh with a sense of relief.
The simplicity of the surroundings and the natural attitudes of the people have an almost Dutch character, borne out by the meticulous care for detail in the execution united to an effect of chiaro-oscuro very rare in early Italian art and hardly to be expected in a painter of Crivelli's Paduan tendencies. The St. George is more characteristic, with an immense energy in its lines.
A conventional background is no more an error in French classic painting than in tapestry; a perfunctory scheme of pure chiaro-oscuro is no blemish in one of Diaz's splendid forest landscapes; such phenomena in a work of Raffaelli or Pointelin would jar, because, measured by the standards to which modern men must, through the very force of evolution itself, subscribe, they can but appear solecisms.
His aim was to deceive the eye of the spectator by the semblance of reality: he painted men and things as they really appeared. He also made a great advance in coloring: he invented chiaro-oscuro. Other painters had given attention to the proper gradation of light and shade; he heightened this effect by the gradation of tints, and thus obtained what the moderns call tone.
His Talissus took him seven years to complete. Pamphilus was celebrated for composition, Antiphilus for facility, Theon of Samos for prolific fancy, Apelles for grace, Pausias for his chiaro-oscuro, Nicomachus for his bold and rapid pencil, Aristides for depth of expression.
What we call diffused light on Earth, the grateful result of refraction, the luminous matter held in suspension by the air, the mother of our dawns and our dusks, of our blushing mornings and our dewy eyes, of our shades, our penumbras, our tints and all the other magical effects of chiaro-oscuro this diffused light has absolutely no existence on the surface of the Moon.
The effect thus imparted to the scene, though in reality no more than usual, affected the mind as unnatural, and even sinister in its operation of unwonted chiaro-oscuro. Presently the sullen clearness of the distance was swept and softened by a storm. Another, falling some miles nearer, became superimposed upon it.
The windows were hung with heavy tapestry of ancient pattern and rich dye, and also the walls, save where covered with books. A soft and summery atmosphere, the warmth of which emanated from concealed furnaces, neutralized the chill of an autumnal night, and the mellow chiaro-oscuro of a vast astral diffused its lunar effulgence on all around.