From Da Vinci to Degas: how famous artists are affected by their vision

Was Leonardo Da Vinci's genius helped by a vision disorder? This is certainly what new research suggests.

The analysis of the Renaissance painter's face from paintings, drawings and sculptures revealed that he may have suffered from strabismus – known as strabismus.

Da Vinci is thought to have suffered from a type called intermittent exotropia, which causes one or both eyes to turn outward and affects about one in 200 people.

The researchers suggested that the disorder may have helped him because it would have allowed him to switch to monocular vision, in which both eyes are used separately, and allowed him to focus on flat and close surfaces.

"It's hard to say which eye was touched by the paints," says Professor Christopher Tyler, a visual neuroscientist. "But it would have been particularly useful for the whole scene to be geometrically correct."

His study, published in JAMA Opthalmology, saw him scrutinizing surviving images of Da Vinci – very few. They included he Vitruvian Man sketch and bronze sculpture David, reputed to be a representation of the young Da Vinci.

In all cases, the defect of eye alignment was measurable, without being serious or average, with an average deviation of -10.3 degrees from the focused eye on the six rooms. The negative number means that the eye normally looks outward (exotropy) and Professor Tyler argues that Da Vinci's strabismus might have been non-existent when he was concentrating on an object, but that He would come in when he would have relaxed to paint – giving him the best of both worlds.

"The weight of the converging evidence suggests that Da Vinci had intermittent exotropy, with a resulting ability to switch to monocular vision," he said. "That might explain how easy it is to describe the three-dimensional solidity of faces and objects in the world and the deep recession of deep mountain scenes."

Numerous studies published over the past four or five decades have evaluated the incidence of eye diseases on the work of great painters, including that of Dr. Michael Marmor, author of several books on the subject.

Here are some of the most prominent artists whose work has been affected by their vision problems.

degas

Degas suffered from a blurred vision from 1860 to 1910, his style becoming more and more rough as his eye disease progressed.

In 2006, Dr. Marmor concluded that his central vision, with the sharpest sharpness, had weakened in recent years. As she became fuzzy, her painting style became ruder, losing the refinement of her previous work.

Mamor suspected that his later works seemed softer and more natural to Degas than to the viewers with healthy eyes, as they were filtered through his own visual pathology.

Rembrandt

In 2004, neuroscientists Margaret S Livingstone and Bevil R Conway, then students at Harvard Medical School, noticed that the eyes of the Dutch painter of the seventeenth century were often misaligned in her self-portraits. the other looked on the side.

Livingstone and Conway thought that, if Rembrandt had been painted with ruthless precision, he had a bad stereovision – which could have been an advantage because he would have had trouble understanding the stereoscopic signals.

Stereo blindness, or the inability to use the horizontal shift between our eyes to allow us to see in 3D, can help artists to paint in two dimensions.

Monet

Claude Monet wrote about his growing frustration with the deterioration of his vision in 1914, noting that colors no longer have the same intensity.

"The Reds had started to look muddy," he writes. "My painting was getting darker and darker."

After undergoing a cataract surgery in 1923, Monet was able to return to his original painting style and even threw away much of the artwork that he had completed during the ten-year period when he was suffering from an eye disease.

Georgia O'Keeffe

The famous American painter of the twentieth century was best known for his paintings of flowers, skulls of animals and landscapes of the southeast.

Macular degeneration – a pathological condition that may result in blurred vision or lack of vision in the center of the visual field – O'Keeffe completed his last unassisted oil painting in 1972.

However, his diminished sight did not extinguish his desire to create art. Becoming almost blind, O'Keeffe returned to the art with the help of several assistants and created favorite visual motifs from memory and imagination.

In 1977, when he was 90, he said, "I see what I want to paint. The thing that makes you want to create is always there.