Colorito (colore) is a term usually applied to 16th-century Venetian painting in which colour is employed in a dominant manner, for sensual expressive purposes and as an important compositional element.
At the time, colore was not distinguished in meaning from paint itself, so an emphasis on colore could also imply an emphasis on the handling of paint.
Such concerns were contrasted by contemporaries with disegno (drawing and design in an intellectual sense), the hallmark of Florentine art. A debate arose about the relative merits of the work of the Venetian Titian and the Florentine Michelangelo for whom the use of colore and disegno respectively were guiding principles.
