News Briefs Archive

The Eye Condition that Contributed to da Vinci’s Genius

Oct. 24, 2018

A rare eye condition helped Leonardo da Vinci paint distance and depth of objects on flat surfaces with the accuracy which he became famous for, according to reporting by Nina Avramova on CNN.

Da Vinci, one of the world’s most celebrated painters, had intermittent exotropia, a type of eye misalignment in which one eye turns outward, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology.

A bronze sculpture of David, reputed to be a depiction of the young Leonardo da Vinci, shows eye misalignment, the study says.

“Looking at his work, I noticed the pronounced divergence of the eyes in all of his paintings,” the study’s author, Christopher Tyler, a research professor at City University of London and the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, explained to Avramova.

Analyzing the direction of the gaze in six likely self-portraits of da Vinci — two sculptures, two oil paintings and two drawings — Avramova says Tyler found that some of the work showed signs of exotropia, with the eyes looking at an outward angle. Not all six works were self-portraits, but da Vinci specified in his own writings that any portrait work by a painter reflects the painter’s own appearance.

Tyler assessed the eye condition by drawing circles to the pupils, irises and eyelids on each painting and measuring their positions. When he converted the measurements into an angle, the results showed da Vinci had an exotropia tendency, with one eye turning -10.3 degrees outward when relaxed. But the master artist could revert his eye to a straight alignment when focused.

Tyler believes that da Vinci’s left eye was affected by the condition, but it is not easy to be sure.

The eye misalignment exotropia, a form of strabismus, affects about 1 percent of the world population, he told Avramova.

Da Vinci’s exotropia allowed him to see the world from a different angle. “What he was looking at would look more like a flat canvas than like for us a three-dimensional screen,” Tyler said; this made it “easier to translate things onto the canvas.”

To Top
Subscribe Today for Free...
And join more than 35,000 optometric colleagues who have made Review of Optometric Business their daily business advisor.