Chiaroscuro is a high-contrast lighting technique that uses a key light to achieve dark backgrounds with starkly lit subjects.

Leonardo da Vinci is among the old master artists who developed the chiaroscuro technique. The world famous painting The Mona Lisa is an excellent example of this.

The opposite of chiaroscuro lighting is: Flat lighting. Flat lighting is: Highly diffused, slow falloff, highly transparent shadows.

Chiaroscuro lighting can be seen in Film Noir, which is a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace. The term was originally applied to American thriller or detective films made in the period 1944–54.

The set up to achieve chiaroscuro lighting, is quite similar to Rembrandt lighting, however this light source would be much sharper and the image produced would have to be quite dark and defined, meaning a diffused box wouldn’t specifically be used.