Was El Greco Astigmatic?

The painter El Greco

Was El Greco Astigmatic?
El Greco, or “The Greek,” was the nickname of
Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541–1614), a great
artist of the seventeenth century. Born on the island
of Crete, he studied art in Italy with Titian, another
famous painter, and moved to Spain in 1577. As he
grew older, the human figures in his paintings
became progressively more elongated, almost
looking unnatural. This lengthening is one of the
most distinctive characteristics of his style, making it
relatively easy for art historians to tell the difference
between his paintings and those produced by other
artists of the period.
Some art historians suggested that his distortion of
the human figure might have been the result of
astigmatism. They theorized that El Greco had a
type of astigmatism that caused him to see elongated
human figures as normally proportioned.
Though this theory is interesting, researchers generally
believe his style was purposeful, not the
result of a refractive error. As evidence they state
that some of the figures in his paintings have
normal body proportions, and x-ray studies of his
paintings reveal that he sketched normally proportioned
figures on his canvas before starting to
add color and then painted his elongated figures
over the sketched outlines.

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