Sfumato creates smoky transitions between light and dark, avoiding hard edges and allowing figures to seem enveloped by air. The technique can make expressions and spaces feel elusive, intimate, or psychologically complex. In poetry, sfumato describes an indirect mode of suggestion in which meanings blur rather than declare themselves. A sfumato poem may use ambiguity, muted imagery, and gentle transitions to evoke emotions that cannot be sharply named.

Sfumato, strongly associated with Leonardo da Vinci, is a painting technique in which sharp outlines are softened through extremely subtle transitions of tone and colour. Forms seem to emerge gradually from atmosphere and shadow rather than being bounded by hard contours. The word is related to the Italian for smoke, which captures the hazy visual effect. In poetry criticism it can provide a useful analogy for indistinct, suggestive, or atmospherically blurred description. Compare chiaroscuro, modelling, glazing, tonal transition, atmospheric perspective, softness, haze, ambiguity, and Leonardo.