Vision of the Masters: Artistic or Impaired?

Do you have a good 'eye' for art?

Let's turn it around: Do artists have good eyes?

I have written in an earlier WebMD blog how some of the great masters continued to paint magnificent works of art while enduring progressive visual deterioration.

Now, an ophthalmologist who has devoted much of his career to studying the role of visual sciences in the creative process has attempted to recreate what selected artists were experiencing at the time their masterpieces were being created.

Dr. Michael Marmor, Professor at Stanford University, relied on computer simulations plus his own expert knowledge of visual disabilities to offer a hypothetical vision of what Edgar Degas and Claude Monet probably saw when applying paint to canvas. Degas had some form of progressive retinal degeneration and, as previously reported, Monet suffered visual complications from both cataracts and cataract surgery.

According to Marmor, Degas and Monet were both founders of the Impressionist era, and the style of both painters was well-formed before their eye disease affected their vision. But their paintings grew significantly more abstract in later life as, coincidentally, their eye problems increased. Art afficionados are left to wonder if the stylistic changes in the paintings were intentional (artist's vision) or more likely a reflection of chronic progressive eye diseases (impaired vision).

Click here to learn more about this interesting analysis and to view some of Dr. Marmor's simulations.

Related Topics:

• The DaVinci Health Code
• The Artist's Muse

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