Through Uncorrected Eyes

If the world's great artists had had better eyesight, would they have'painted differently? In a lecture at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, an ophthalmic surgeon last week asked the old question, made his answer--yes--and offered a new kind of evidence.

Patrick Dacre Trevor-Roper,* a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, was well aware that ever since 19th century critics dubbed El Greco an "astigmatic lunatic" the sight defect thesis had often been offered. But Trevor-Roper's research was carefully prepared. Flashing a slide projection of El Greco's famed Portrait of the Grand Inquisitor Don Fernando Nino de Guevara on one side of the lecture-hall screen, he pointed out that an astigmatic person sees an upright figure thinner and longer, a horizontal shape shorter and thicker. Next to the exact image he then projected a second slide of the same portrait--this time as seen through an astigmatism-correcting lens. Where the cardinal had appeared elongated and distorted, he now appeared normal; where the cardinal had leaned forward almost falling off his chair, he now sat squarely.

After repeating this procedure with Holbein's King Henry VIII, Cranach's Lucretia and a Modigliani portrait, Trevor-Roper went on to examine other artists affected by eye diseases. Cezanne's myopia may be the reason, he said, for Cezanne's blur. Monet suffered from cataract, which caused his greens to become more yellow, his blues more purple. Constable may not have realized how brown his trees appeared to normal vision because he was colorblind. "A fuzziness or what art historians would call "breadth,' " he went on, is the weakness of eyes that comes with age, and "is very apparent in the latest paintings of long-lived artists like Rembrandt and Titian." Finally, Trevor-Roper moved to a deeper area of speculation: the tendency of cubists and constructionists to represent nature in rigid geometric patterns, he said, may be explained by pressure on the pineal gland behind the eyes.

Trevor-Roper's lecture stirred some of London's art fraternity to reply. Said Art Director James Laver of the Victoria and Albert Museum: "El Greco? Astigmatism? Admittedly! But the genius begins where the astigmatism ends." What Trevor-Roper had not dealt with was the artist's inner eye, i.e., imagination. William Blake once wrote that "a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees." Perhaps El Greco's inner eye was also astigmatic.

* Brother of Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (The Last Days of Hitler).

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