Word in context: chiaroscuro

Well, I’ve decided to blog about interesting or unusual words that I come across in my reading.  This is partly a way to solidify them in my own vocabulary and partly as a service to you, my reader.

Today’s word is chiaroscuro and here is the context in which I read it:

Place names attract attitudes too, both negative and positive, usually on the basis of how they sound.  Mrs Elton, in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), is under no illusions: ‘One has no great hopes for Birmingham, I always say there is something direful in the sound.’  By contrast, Somerset Maugham’s travelogue The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) waxes lyrical about Mandalay: ‘the falling cadence of the lovely word has gathered about itself the chiaroscuro of romance’. – David Crystal, Words, Words, Words, (Oxford University Press, 2006) 76.

L'autre moi by mkorchia. Demonstration of chiaroscuro.

Chiaroscuro began as a technical term in the art world and refers to the contrast between light and dark (or shade) in a picture.  Evidently lighting and shading techniques can be used to give a more three-dimensional impression.  The term is also used in relation to photography and film. The etymology is Italian. Chiaro means bright and is related to the English word “clear”. Oscuro means dark, and is related to our word ”obscure.”

Note that the word is pronounced beginning with a kee-a sound.

Incidentally, none of the definitions of this term suggest that it is used in a non-artistic context.  Somerset Maugham seems to mean something like “the complex and pleasing shadings.” I’m not sure that he was particularly successful in this little piece of wordsmithery, because even with a dictionary definition of chiaroscuro directly in front of me, I am still not sure what “the chiaroscuro of romance” means.