How did painters fake dramatic candlelight centuries before cinema?

Long before electric lighting, or even film, painters had already solved the problem of making a single beam of light feel dramatic. The Italian technique is called chiaroscuro, literally "light-dark," the use of strong contrasts between bright and shadowed areas to make flat paint look three-dimensional and make a scene feel urgent. It took root in the Renaissance and is most closely associated with Baroque art, used by Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Goya, among others.

The basic trick is far older than any of them: the Ancient Greeks already had a word for it, "skiagraphia," or shadow-painting, credited to the fifth-century-BC painter Apollodoros, and a mosaic from the following century is even inscribed "knowledge did it." Caravaggio pushed the idea to its extreme around 1600, lighting dark scenes with a single shaft of light from an unseen source, a style so intense it earned its own name, tenebrism. A whole genre followed: night scenes lit by a single candle, painted by Caravaggio's followers in Utrecht and by the young Rembrandt in the 1620s. Not everyone approved: Queen Elizabeth I reportedly disliked shadow in portraits so much that she insisted on sitting for hers in an open garden alley, with no tree and no shadow anywhere near her.

The technique never really left. Filmmakers took it up for high-contrast lighting, especially in black-and-white films such as Metropolis, where stark light and shadow visually separate a wealthy elite from the workers below them. In 1975, Stanley Kubrick wanted to film Barry Lyndon lit by nothing but real candles; no lens then had a wide enough aperture to make that possible, so he bought and modified a Zeiss lens originally built for space photography just to shoot 18th-century palace interiors by candle flame.