Design Nomenclature / Composition
Atmospheric perspective
Also called aerial perspective
Depth read from the air itself: distant forms lose contrast, shift toward the sky's colour, and soften at the edge, because scattering fills the intervening volume. A tonal cue independent of geometry — it works on a shapeless field, where linear perspective has nothing to converge.
In practice
'Aerial perspective' is Leonardo's name and still standard in painting. The effect needs distance and air; across a few metres there is nothing to scatter and nothing to depict.
Not to be confused with
- Linear perspectiveA geometric construction projecting a three-dimensional scene onto the picture plane from one fixed eye point, so that parallel lines converge at vanishing points on a horizon set at eye height. Formalized by Brunelleschi and Alberti in the fifteenth century. It is a drawing system, not a description of vision.
- Depth cueAny feature of a flat image a viewer reads as depth: overlap, relative size, atmospheric perspective, linear perspective, texture gradient, height in the field, shadow. Pictorial cues need only a plane, which is why they are the whole toolkit in print. They accumulate, and they can be set against each other.