The influence of visual pathology on painting

Abstract

AbstractPainting is, along with sculpture and architecture, the most visual of the Fine Arts and it is probably the most ancient of them. The oldest known paintings were discovered on the walls of caves in Indonesia and Spain and are believed to be more than 40 000 years old.In painting, vision is crucial both for the artists and for the viewers. Diseases affecting the eyes can have a huge impact in the artistic expression of the painters, for instance refractive errors like myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism, disorders related with age such as cataracts, presbyopia and age related macular degeneration or different pathologies including colour blindness, diabetic retinopathy, vitreal haemorrhage, retinal dystrophies, strabismus, tumours… seem to have influenced the paintings of many artists.However, it is difficult to evaluate the degree of the impact that these disorders actually have on the works of the painters. The style of an artist depends on many factors including the time or era they live in, the School of painting they belonged to, religion, politics, the influence of teachers and colleagues and, of course, their own stylistic choice. The way they perceive the world that surrounds them is surely an important factor that affects their creations, but not the only one.In this speech, we will try to look over some famous painters' works and try to explain how their ocular problems influenced their production. We will also discuss some widespread theories about alleged visual problems affecting various artists and their (lack of) accuracy.