2020 Year of Vision
With 2020 being our self-styled ‘Year of Vision’, we have focussed on artists whose own focus may have been somewhat impaired. It is easy to assume that great artists throughout history would have had perfect eyesight; after all, how else would Claude Monet have painted those rich landscapes and Leonardo Da Vinci sketched such detailed drawings? However, upon further examination, it appears that a lot of the great masters were actually visually impaired. contribution to sculpture, architecture, science, engineering, anatomy, geology, botany, literature and mathematics. His notebooks are prized by some of the world’s most influential museums, revered for their contents, showing inventions often centuries ahead of their time. It is curious to discover that Da Vinci almost certainly suffered Da Vinci has been referred to by some as “the father of the Renaissance” because of his from a sight impairment called a strabismus, meaning that one eye would have remained focussed on an object or scene while the other turned outwards, upwards or downwards. The sufferer’s inability to reconcile the view from both eyes simultaneously is conversely a great gift to artists, as it allows them to view the three-dimensional world around them as two- dimensional – making it that much easier for them to replicate it on paper or canvas.
Failing vision was common amongst artists, Claude Monet being a prime example. Difficulties with colour perception in his seventies led to a diagnosis of bilateral cataracts, for which he was offered corrective surgery by several leading ophthalmologists, but Monet wasn’t keen to undertake the procedure. He persevered with glasses, and later eye drops to dilate the pupil in his left eye, but the initially improvements were short-lived and eventually he relied on painting from memory. Several theories have been touted over the years about Vincent van Gogh’s vision. One such school of thought is that the abundance of yellow in his paintings stems from him being treated with digitalis, a drug derived from the preparation of foxgloves. Used today to treat certain heart conditions, it was prescribed to Van Gogh as a remedy for his melancholy. In toxic (but non-lethal) doses, it has been reported to cause a yellowing of the vision, which may have influenced how the artist viewed the world around him. Similarly, the artist’s extreme fondness for absinthe may have played its own part; for example, The Starry Night has distinctly psychotropic characteristics. Known as la fée verte (the green fairy), absinthe became de rigeur among the artistic community in spite of (or perhaps because of!) its acknowledged hallucinogenic properties.
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