Chiaroscuro

When colour passes gradually from light to dark, a flat surface takes on volume. Pushed to the extreme, with deep shadow closing around the subject, it is called tenebrism, generally credited to Caravaggio and taken up in seventeenth-century Spain by painters such as Ribera. Spanish painters used light and dark in different ways: Velázquez caught a passing light to show a sitter's vitality and restrained dignity, Goya let deep darkness expose human madness, and by the nineteenth century Sorolla made the dazzling Mediterranean sun itself his subject.

Find the brightest spot in the painting first, then see how the shadow gathers the rest into darkness.

Where does the light come from, and what does it fall on first?