Blog 6

Poor Vision Leads to Great Art

While passing through the Lane Medical Library at Stanford, I noticed an exhibit on eye diseases and how it gave some of the great painters a different vision of their work. The exhibit is the work of Dr. Michael Marmor of the Dept. of Ophthalmology at Stanford. It features impressionist painters Degas (who had retinal disease) and Monet (who struggled with cataracts). The exhibit pointed out how dark and muddled later paintings of Monet’s famous lily pond reflect symptoms of cataracts. And Degas’ later paintings became so blurry it’s difficult to see the artist’s brushstrokes. Dr. Marmor notes that such artists as Monet, Degas, Rembrandt and Georgia O’Keefe all reached their heights of artistic vision as their ocular vision declined.

Rembrandt lacked stereoscopic vision. According to an article in Science news, an analysis of his self portraits reveals that his eyes tended to gaze away from each other and not focus on a single point. As a result, he lacked depth perception so this may have actually helped him render 3 dimensions onto flat surfaces. A person with normal vision is often instructed by the art teacher to close one eye in order to flatten what they see. You can see in his self protrait above how his right eye looks straight at the viewer, but the other eye looks off to the side.