A silhouette is the overall outline shape of a figure or object read against its surround — the form taken in as a single bounded outline, with internal detail subordinated or absent.
Description reaches for silhouette when the question is how does this thing read at a glance, as a shape: a strong silhouette is legible immediately and survives reduction to a flat dark area against a flat light one; a weak silhouette dissolves into its background or is too internally fussy to register as a single form. Posture, gesture, and proportion all read first through silhouette. The word originally names the eighteenth-century cut-paper profile portrait (after Étienne de Silhouette), but the broader pictorial usage — the readable outer shape of any form — is the more general one.
See also
- contour — the line that traces the silhouette
- figure-ground — the relation a silhouette depends on
- flatness — the condition silhouette tends toward