Term: Sfumato

Sfumato is a painting technique where tones and colors are blended gradually into one another softening and obscuring the edges. The blending is most often done using miniscule brushstrokes making hazy but realistic forms.

Sfumato is one of the four classical painting modes of the Renaissance (the others being Cangiante, Chiaroscuro, and Unione). Leonardo da Vinci described sfumato as "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane." Ernst Gombrich, a twentieth-century art historian, explains that sfumato "allow[s] one form to merge with another and always leave[s] something to our imagination."