Ophthalmologists came to the conclusion that the peculiarities of the disease gave the artist the opportunity to create images on the canvas more voluminous.
Leonardo himself considered himself primarily a scientist and engineer. Fine art was a secondary occupation for him, so he did not have much time to write. About 20 paintings by Leonardo have come down to us (the authorship of some works has not been precisely established). However, the genius and this was enough to make a revolution in painting. Before Leonardo, most artists did not understand how to convey a three-dimensional image on canvas - the world in their paintings was quite flat. Da Vinci developed a new painting technique that gave depth, perspective and volume.
Of course, here we must pay tribute to the artistic talent of the great Florentine. However, neuroscientist Christopher Tyler of London City University School of Medicine suggested that Leonardo's physiological traits might have played a role. In particular, his vision problems.
Physical evidence worth $ 450,000
Professor Tyler examined 6 pieces of art that supposedly depict Da Vinci. This list includes two sculptures by Andrea del Verrocchio. Leonardo was his student and it is believed that it was he who acted as a model when creating the sculptures "David" and "Young Warrior". Then two drawings were analyzed - a self-portrait of Leonardo in old age and the famous "Vitruvian Man", created by the artist to determine the canonical proportions of the human body. And besides, Tyler studied two pictures for which, apparently, Leonardo posed - "Young John the Baptist" and "Savior of the World." The last work was sold at Christie's in November 2017 for a record $ 450 million and is officially recognized as the most expensive work of art in the history of mankind. The buyer turned out to be the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the painting is exhibited at the new Dover Abu Dhabi Museum.
Sculpture Young Warrior (1470).
Sculpture David (1475).
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The scientist discovered a deviation of the visual axes of the eyes in every image of Leonardo Da Vinci. For the sculpture of David, the divergence angle was -13.2 °, for the "Young Warrior" -12.5. In the case of "John the Baptist" this figure was -9.1 °, and with the "Savior of the world" -8.6 °. However, in the drawings of da Vinci himself, this defect was less noticeable: "Vitruvian Man" mowed at an angle of -5.9 °, and a self-portrait of an elderly Leonardo at -8.3 °.
- These data, taken together, suggest that Leonardo da Vinci had intermittent exotropia (a form of divergent squint - author). says Christopher Tyler. - This feature allowed Leonardo to arbitrarily switch from binocular (volumetric) vision to monocular (one eye). In other words, he literally could see the world differently.
In Da Vinci's painting, the effect is not so noticeable.
Rembrandt and Picasso also mowed
Tyler suggests that this ailment actually gave the artist a huge advantage. After all, the complexity of a painter's work is to transfer three-dimensional objects of the surrounding world onto a two-dimensional surface of the canvas. And this is difficult when you yourself see objects only in volume. But Leonardo, with his periodic exotropia, could easily switch his vision from 3D to 2D and back.
By the way, other famous artists had the same vision feature. Christopher Tyler claims that Rembrandt van Rijn, Albrecht Durer, Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso suffered from a violation of the parallelism of the visual axis of the eyes. Traces of this pathology can be found in their self-portraits. The complexity of the case with Leonardo da Vinci lies in the fact that scientists still do not have 100% confidence that he is depicted in the portraits of sculptures and self-portraits that are attributed to him.
However, this scientific work also has a completely unexpected practical, everyday meaning. Strabismus is observed in about 4 percent of the world's inhabitants. And people are very worried about this. Now it turns out that one of the greatest painters in human history had exactly the same problem. But she by no means prevented him from living, but, rather, made it possible to make a breakthrough in art. This means that the rest need to be less complex on this score.
YAROSLAV KOROBATOV