sfumato

English

Etymology

From Italian sfumato (“shaded, toned down”).

Noun

sfumato (usually uncountable, plural sfumatos)

1. (art, painting) A painting technique, prominent during the Italian Renaissance, involving the application of subtle layers of translucent paint, blurring the transition between colors, tones and often objects and creating the illusion of depth. [from 1909]
   • 1869, Charles Lock Eastlake, Materials for a History of Oil Painting, Volume II, Longmans, Green & Co., page 206:

     Another quality which was adopted from Leonardo, and of which the Florentines were especially enamoured, was the ‘sfumato’ system—the imperceptible softening of the transitions in half-tints and shadows.

   • 1960, Helmut Ruhemann, Leonardo's Use of Sfumato, in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 1, British Society of Aesthetics, page 233,

     The interpretation of ‘sfumato’ is equally wrong. In ‘sfumato’ there is no blurring of the outlines which delineate the contours of figures and there is no blending or diminution of the definition of forms or for that matter any mellowing of colours.

   • 1991, Philip Sohm, Pittoresco, Cambridge University Press, page 4:

     It could be said that sfumato is less exact than line and that its forms are less precisely defined, but with these apparent omissions comes a sense of atmosphere. By casting its shadow over concrete form, sfumato dissolves it.

   • 2002, Scott Lash, Mike Featherstone, editors, Recognition and Difference, SAGE Publications, page 200:

     In baroque painting, sfumato is the blurring of outlines and colors amongst objects, as clouds and mountains, or the sea and the sky. Sfumato allows baroque subjectivity to create the near and the familiar among different intelligibilities, thus making cross-cultural dialogues possible and desirable.

   • 2018, Lena Redman, Knowing with New Media, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature, page 234,

     No smeared sfumatos—blurred lines and borders—or anaemic chewing of emotions, just forcefully chopped slabs of substance.

   • 2022, Ellen Jones, Robin Myers (translators), Ave Barrera, The Forgery, Charco Press, unnumbered page,

     As I was saying, I was worried because my sfumatos didn't look anything like they did in the original.

Usage notes

• Frequently italicized.

Translations

painting technique

• Finnish: sfumato (fi)
• French: sfumato (fr) m
• German: Sfumato
• Italian: sfumato (it) m

See also

• sfumatura
• atmospheric perspective

Further reading

• Italian Renaissance painting § High Renaissance painting on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

French

Noun

sfumato m (plural sfumatos)

1. (art) sfumato

Further reading

• “sfumato”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Italian

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /sfuˈma.to/
• Rhymes: -ato
• Hyphenation: sfu‧mà‧to

Participle

sfumato (feminine sfumata, masculine plural sfumati, feminine plural sfumate)

1. past participle of sfumare

Adjective

sfumato (feminine sfumata, masculine plural sfumati, feminine plural sfumate)

1. shaded
2. hazy
3. disappeared

Romanian

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from Italian sfumato.

Noun

sfumato n (uncountable)

1. sfumato

Declension

singular only	indefinite	definite
nominative-accusative	sfumato	sfumatoul
genitive-dative	sfumato	sfumatoului
vocative	sfumatoule