Based in Southern California, Mark Paskewitz is a respected pharmaceutical development director who has assisted in managing clinical trials that produced novel medicines. Passionate about art through the centuries, Mark Paskewitz has a particular interest in the works of Renaissance masters such as El Greco and Leonardo da Vinci.
As reported in Live Science, researchers at the City University of London's Division of Optometry and Visual Sciences recently completed a study that postulates that da Vinci’s art was aided by his eye condition, strabismus, or crossed eyes.
A condition in which both eyes cannot focus on the same point simultaneously, strabismus is often compensated for by the brain's suppression of vision in the "wandering" eye. What this results in is 2D "monocular" vision, which can amplify the ability of an artist to capture three dimensionality on a flat canvas.
Associated with many visual artists from Pablo Picasso to Rembrandt van Rijn (based on self-portrait analysis), strabismus has been difficult to assess for da Vinci, as there are only a handful of confirmed self-portraits of the artist. By analyzing the pupil positions in other works of portraiture that may have used elements of the artist’s likeness, researchers discovered that the works seem to depict exotropia, the form of the condition in which one or both of the eyes are turned outwardly. The advantage of this condition for a painter would have been that the actual person or place depicted could have been continuously monitored while the other eye focused on the canvas.
