Sfumato is the Renaissance technique associated with Leonardo da Vinci that creates soft transitions between colors and tones without sharp outlines.
The word comes from the Italian sfumare, meaning “to tone down” or “to evaporate.” Artists built the effect by applying extremely thin, translucent layers of paint, allowing forms to appear gently modeled rather than bounded by hard lines.
Leonardo used sfumato particularly in faces and atmospheric backgrounds. The technique is famously visible in the Mona Lisa, where the corners of the mouth and eyes seem subtly shifting because no single contour defines them sharply. It also appears in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks.
Sfumato is sometimes confused with chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro emphasizes strong contrasts between light and dark, while sfumato concerns the gradual softening of transitions. The two techniques can be used together, but they are not synonyms.