Learn the definition of atmospheric perspective, also known as aerial perspective, in art. Explore the various types of perspectives in art, and view examples.
Atmospheric & Aerial Perspective in Art | Definition & Examples
Table of Contents
- What is Atmospheric Perspective in Art?
- History of Aerial Perspective in Art
- Elements of Aerial Perspective in Art
- Atmospheric Perspective Examples in Art
- Lesson Summary
Frequently Asked Questions
What three things define atmospheric perspective?
First, atmospheric perspective requires less clarity of objects as they get further away. Second, objects become closer in value to the background the further away they get, and thirdly, objects progressively take on the hue of the atmosphere as they get further away.
How do you create atmospheric perspective in art?
Creating atmospheric perspective in art first requires the study of how the atmosphere influences how distant objects are seen. Then, use changes in value, hue, saturation, and clarity to recreate this phenomenon.
Which painting is an example of atmospheric perspective?
Albert Bierstadt's "The Rocky Mountains" painted in 1863 is an excellent example of atmospheric perspective. The foreground is painted in rich color and detail, while the distant mountains are less detailed and take on the color and value of the atmosphere.
What is the difference between linear perspective and aerial perspective?
Linear perspective refers to how the lines of objects recede toward vanishing points on the horizon line, making them appear like they get smaller and recede into the distance. Atmospheric perspective refers to how the atmosphere makes distant objects appear bluer and less detailed.
What is the atmospheric perspective in art?
Atmospheric perspective is how the atmosphere influences how distant objects appear. The further away an object, the less clear they are, and the more they take on the value and hue of the background.
Table of Contents
- What is Atmospheric Perspective in Art?
- History of Aerial Perspective in Art
- Elements of Aerial Perspective in Art
- Atmospheric Perspective Examples in Art
- Lesson Summary
Artists use many forms of perspective in order to create the illusion of depth on a flat surface. There is traditional perspective, where objects that are further away appear smaller. Atmospheric perspective is another subtler form of perspective. What is atmospheric perspective in art? Atmospheric perspective creates the impression of atmosphere between the viewer and the subject. It is also called aerial view, meaning how it refers to the way the atmosphere influences the way we see distant objects. As things get further away, a few things are happening. First, they appear smaller. Second, objects lose detail, becoming progressively simpler and flatter forms. Third, the atmosphere the viewer is looking through to see a distant object influences the color of the object.
If possible, look out to the distance, notice how any mountains or distant buildings appear, and compare that to how they might look when seen from up close. There is less detail to them, and they take on a blue hue the further away they get (or a different color, depending on the level of pollution in the area or even the time of day). Knowing atmospheric perspective's art definition helps in understanding this phenomenon and recreating it in artwork.
Types of Perspective in Art
As mentioned earlier, there are multiple types of perspective in art, but they can be broken down into two categories: linear perspective and atmospheric perspective, which is detailed above.
Linear perspective is how lines appear to recede into the distance to a vanishing point, as well as how distant objects appear to get smaller because of their lines getting closer to the vanishing point. There are three forms of linear perspective that are used in art:
- One Point Perspective: There is one vanishing point on the horizon line into which lines will recede. Front-facing surfaces appear flat, while all other visible sides of objects have their lines receding into a single vanishing point.
- Two Point Perspective: There are two vanishing points on the horizon line into which lines will recede. The lines on the top and bottom of objects recede to their respective vanishing points.
- Three Point Perspective: There are three vanishing points: two on the horizon line, and one above or below the horizon line. Lines perpendicular to the horizon line vanish toward the third point, creating an exaggerated sense of height.
Your next lesson will play in
10 seconds
Artists have been painting atmospheric perspective art for centuries, with one of the earliest examples dating back to Ancient Greco-Roman fresco paintings. Greek and Roman artists were obsessed with depicting figures, objects, and scenes as close to reality as possible in their frescoes, and paid close attention to things such as atmospheric perspective. However, during the Middle Ages, these techniques were lost and substituted for art in the Byzantine style, which depicted biblical scenes or figures in a pictorial style.
 |
During the 15th century, Renaissance painters revived these techniques. Perspective, both linear and atmospheric, has been a fundamental of art ever since. Leon Battista Alberti believed paintings needed to have a convincing depiction of three-dimensional space. He wrote a theoretical text titled On Painting in 1435 that was one of the first texts to describe linear perspective and the purpose of painting. Leonardo da Vinci studied atmospheric perspective a great deal and even coined the term "aerial perspective" in his Treatise on Painting to describe this phenomenon, where "colours become weaker in proportion to their distance from the person who is looking at them."
The development of perspective was not only happening in Western countries. Chinese painters also utilized the technique, in an albeit slightly different style. In the 12th century, artist Han Cho innovated the technique of atmospheric perspective in his Shan-shui Ch'un-ch'uan chi, a treatise on painting style. In it, he describes three new kinds of perspective, all relating to aerial perspective and how atmospheric conditions create vagueness and a lack of clarity with distance.
 |
There are several key elements to consider when incorporating atmospheric perspective into artworks, such as:
- Texture: both physical texture and texture rendering.
- Value: The brightness or darkness of the colors.
- Clarity: The level of detail that can be seen on the object.
- Saturation: How rich the colors are.
- Hue: The color of objects.
Atmospheric perspective drawing or painting takes these things into account when rendering objects closer and further away.
Texture in Atmospheric Perspective
The texture becomes less obvious the further away an object is. This ties into clarity, as the further away something is, the harder it is to see small details. Texture, regarding atmospheric perspective, can relate both to the physical texture of the artwork itself and the rendered texture of the subjects of the artwork. Of course, these rules can be broken, as plenty of artists use greater degrees of physical texture for backgrounds to add visual interest to an otherwise less interesting area.
Value in Aerial Perspective
According to aerial perspective, the further away an object gets, the less contrast between its value and the value of the background. This means that more distant objects will be closer in value to the background. Value refers to the brightness or darkness of colors, though that can be tricky to spot. Often, artists will use a gray scale to measure values, as value without color is simply different shades of lighter and darker gray.
Clarity in Atmospheric Perspective
In atmospheric perspective painting, objects that are far away are less clear. This means that any details that could be seen when closer can't be made out from a distance. For example, it is easy to see individual leaves up close to a tree. From far away, however, they appear to be one cluster of color.
Color Saturation
As objects get farther away, they also lose saturation, as well. This means that the colors lose their vibrancy, becoming grayer. This effect is limited unless the environment is overcast and rainy. For example, on a clear day, mountains might appear to be less saturated but still have a color, albeit different from how they would appear close up.
Hue Shift
Last, objects take on the color of the atmosphere as they get further away. Most commonly, this is a blue color because blue is the most visible color that gets refracted from all the molecules and particles in the atmosphere. However, in heavily polluted areas, the atmosphere can be a grayer or brownish color, and as a result, that color will be transferred to objects in the distance. During sunrise and sunset, the atmosphere refracts more red light because of the position of the sun (think of how clouds become red, orange, and pink during sunrise and sunset). As a result, distant objects will take on that reddish hue as well.
Albert Bierstadt, a 19th century painter, is a master of atmospheric perspective. In his The Rocky Mountains, the foreground depicts a rich, green field where Native Americans are making camp. Much detail can be seen, such as texture in the gravel on the lower-left corner and the trees on the left-hand side. However, the distant mountains are fairly vague shapes with only important details able to be seen, such as prominent ridges and peaks. The rock, which would appear to be a tan or reddish-brown color normally, turns into a gray color in the distance because of the influence of the hue shift in atmospheric perspective.
 |
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is undoubtedly the most famous painting of all time. The main subject of the painting is rendered in incredible detail, where even individual strands of hair can be seen, as well as the thin veil she wears. In the midground to the left of the figure, ruddy brown hills with a winding path can be seen, though not many details can be made out. In the background there are more hills, which would be the same ruddy color as those in the midground, but atmospheric perspective makes those objects take on the color of the atmosphere, which in this case, is a greenish-grayish tone. Those distant mountains are also very vague shapes, where very few details can be made out at all.
 |
Atmospheric perspective, also called aerial perspective, is a kind of perspective in which objects that are further away are increasingly visually affected by the atmosphere with the goal of creating the illusion of depth in the artwork. There are several ways in which this occurs:
- Texture: both the physical texture as well as rendered texture in the piece
- Value: The brightness or darkness of the colors
- Clarity: The level of detail that can be seen on objects
- Saturation: How rich or gray the colors are
- Hue: The color of objects in the artwork
As things get farther away, details that can be seen on the object become vague, reducing clarity. The colors also become less saturated to a degree, shifting towards grayer tones. The value of colors becomes less contrasted with the value of the background, and the color of objects takes on more of the color of the atmosphere (most commonly blue).
Artists have been using atmospheric perspective for centuries, like Greco-Roman artists who were obsessed with realism. The techniques were lost during the Middle Ages but rediscovered during the Renaissance and mastered by many artists since, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Bierstadt.
Video Transcript
Perspective
Mark Twain once wrote that distance lends enchantment to the view. What a nice thought. What he meant was that the farther away things are, the harder they are to see—which hides the less admirable parts of the scene and lets your imagination fill in the gaps. This is true in life, and it's also a pretty important aspect of art. Artists who work in 2-dimensional media, like painting, often find themselves faced with the challenge of representing 3-dimensional space on a flat surface. Reality has depth, and a painting does not, and so the artist must create the illusion of depth. This illusion is called perspective. In art, as in life, we find that a little perspective can go a long, long way.
Aerial Perspective
There are multiple ways to create the illusion of depth, but today we're talking about one technique called aerial perspective, or sometimes atmospheric perspective. This technique, as the name might imply, involves creating the impression of atmosphere between the viewer and the subject, thus implying distance. The effect is created by reducing the clarity of objects meant to be interpreted as further away and by representing them in increasingly monotone shades of blue. This is done to create a sense of depth by imitating how our eyes perceive distance. Unlike other forms of perspective that are focused on the reduction of size over distance, aerial perspective is all about the changing appearance of objects across space.
 |
Next time you're outside and in a position to look at things across a distance, check out how they appear. Things farther away tend to be sort of blue. Why is this? Our atmosphere contains billions of tiny molecules of water, as well as minute particles of dust, which scatter light waves as they pass through. You know how light breaks into a rainbow when you shine it through a prism? It's a similar concept. Each color of light has a different wavelength, and so as they scatter, we see some more than others. Blue light has the shortest wavelength, and so over distance, objects tend to appear blue, especially if they are naturally darker or cooler. This same phenomenon breaks up the clarity of objects far away and blurs lines together, and is what the illusion of aerial perspective is all about.
Examples Throughout History
Now, ancient peoples did not know much about the behavior of light waves through invisible atmospheric particles, but they were still just as intelligent as us and noticed that things far away tended to be bluish and blurry. So we actually see examples of atmospheric perspective that date back to ancient Greece and Rome, the first Western cultures to really focus on trying to replicate reality in art. Obviously, lots of ancient art has been lost. Luckily for us (although not so luckily for ancient Romans), a giant volcano exploded in 79 CE and buried the city of Pompeii, preserving its art. Look at the wall fresco from Pompeii. As the columns retreat into the distance, they become slightly more blue and less defined.
 |
Europeans weren't the only ones to observe this fact. Check out the ink brush painting by the early 15th-century Chinese master Dai Jin. While Dai Jin did not really work in color, he still captures the essence of aerial perspective in the contrasts of clarity. The trees in the front are dark and well defined, while the edges of the mountains blur to the point of being invisible. Chinese landscape painting frequently used this technique to illustrate distance, creating a unique aesthetic.
 |
After the fall of Rome, Europeans abandoned most of their illusions of depth, including aerial perspective. However, the order-and-mathematics-obsessed artists of the Renaissance rediscovered these techniques. They wanted to represent perfect reality, and that meant getting perspective down to a science. In fact, the term ''aerial perspective'' was first coined by none other than Leonardo da Vinci. We've got one of his paintings from the early 16th century here. Notice how the mountains in the background are distinctly blue and fade into the sky as they recede into the distance? Landscape painting was not a major genre of the Renaissance, so da Vinci used religious paintings like this as an excuse to study perspective in space.
 |
Finally, let's look at one of the undisputed masters of aerial perspective: Albert Bierstadt. Bierstadt was a 19th-century German-born painter who worked in the American Hudson River School of landscape artists. His emphasis on light and shadow helped him develop an immaculately articulated sense of atmospheric space. And just because Bierstadt is so awesome, we'll give you two paintings of his.
 |
 |
Lesson Summary
In art, the illusion of depth on a 2-dimensional surface is created by techniques referred to as perspective. There are many ways to do this. One common way is to imitate the effect of the atmosphere on how we perceive distance. This is called aerial perspective, or sometimes atmospheric perspective, which is when objects appear farther away because they are less clear and/or slightly blue. Because of how molecules in the atmosphere break apart light, things in the distance tend to appear slightly blue, with less defined colors, lines, and shapes. Aerial perspective imitates the effect. There are lots of examples of aerial perspective in art from throughout the ages. Albert Bierstadt, a 19th-century German-born painter, was renowned for his masterful use of the technique. Turns out, capturing the illusion of space in art really is a matter of perspective.
Register to view this lesson
Are you a student or a teacher?
Unlock Your Education
See for yourself why 30 million people use Study.com
Become a Study.com member and start learning now.
Become a MemberAlready a member? Log In
BackResources created by teachers for teachers
Over 30,000 video lessons
& teaching resources‐all
in one place.
I would definitely recommend Study.com to my colleagues. It’s like a teacher waved a magic wand and did the work for me. I feel like it’s a lifeline.
Jennifer B.
Teacher
Back
Atmospheric & Aerial Perspective in Art | Definition & Examples Related Study Materials
Explore our library of over 88,000 lessons
Browse by subject