EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Left Right, Open Closed: Eyes and Perception

I have explained under the theme Insight-Outsight how poetic painters often distinguish between two different modes of perception: outwards to see the exterior world of matter, inwards for insight into the soul and imagination. It is such a common theme in Western art that Picasso used it widely. Now I learn from an article by James Hall that in the Renaissance people attributed exterior sight to the left eye and spirtual insight to the right one. Martin Luther even published an enormously  popular tract explaining, among other things, the difference. According to the anonymous author both eyes could not work simultaneously: the left one had to go to sleep for the right eye to look at the eternal.¹ As I have explained in a recent entry on Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Man with a Book (1523) the new information that each form of perception was attributed to a specific eye means that I need to review my already-published examples to make sure they match. I generally attribute the open eye to exterior perception when it may be the other way around. The left eye might be closed to the exterior world so that the right one – the spiritual one – can open on the divine. That seems to be what is happening in the frightened man at the center of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

1. James Hall, “Spiritual or Sinister?”, Art Quarterly, Autumn 2008, pp. 32-5