"How to paint the air". Scientific fundamentals of the atmospheric perspective

Abstract

The aerial or atmospheric perspective is considered by painters as an essential part of the art of painting, after the naturalistic representation is established through the considerations of linear perspective geometry. Leonardo da Vinci was the first author to define the atmospheric or aerial perspective, after the geometric principles of linear perspective known through L. B. Alberti´s treatise De Pictura (1435).

Two hundred years later, contextualized under the Rationalist ideas of the 18th century, and after the influential publication of the Optics of Newton, the article shows the contributions from science and scientists (specifically through three important figures: Brook Taylor, J. H. Lambert and Gaspard Monge) to the painters, with the aim of arbitrating a precise color measurement, in confrontation with the empiricism of the artistic world.

This issue can be considered one more chapter in the long history of the painting and the representation of atmospheric phenomena, whose direct antecedents go back to the Débat sur le Coloris of the Académie française in the 17th century, and its results will lead to the birth of the modern Theory of color, in answer to the complex question about how to paint the air.