Da Vinci’s possible vision disorder may have influenced his art

Enlarge / The recently restored oil painting Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo, shows evidence of exotropic eye alignment, a new paper claims. (credit: Christopher Tyler)
The great Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci may have suffered from an unusual visual tic: an intermittent outward turn of the eye, clinically known as strabismus. According to a new paper in JAMA Ophthalmology, that disorder may have helped this quintessential Renaissance man capture 3D space on a flat 2D canvas so brilliantly.
If so, Leonardo would be in very good company. Several other famous artists—including Rembrandt, Durer, Degas, and Picasso—likely also had some form of strabismus, based on analysis of eye alignment in their respective self-portraits. Because such a misalignment tends to suppress the deviating eye, this condition would have enabled Leonardo to shift between monocular vision and normal vision, giving him a distinct artistic advantage.
'Try shutting one eye,' explains author Christopher Tyler, a visual neuroscientist at City University of London. 'The world now looks flatter, so the spatial relations are easier to translate onto the flat canvas.'
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