How do you paint a person who cannot see, when closed eyes look much like sleep? Painters have had to find blindness elsewhere in the body, very often in the hands. Two of the pictures below go further still: they were made by painters whose own sight was failing, and the canvas shows it.
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How We Chose
Blindness is an absence, and an absence cannot be painted head on. So painters show it through the body: eyes shut or clouded, a face tipped up toward a light it cannot find, a staff, a guide, hands feeling the air.
A blind figure is always watched by people who can see, so blindness rarely stays plain. It turns into a parable, a punishment, a miracle when sight comes back, an allegory of one of the senses, or a game.
Each picture here was chosen because blindness drives something in it: someone who cannot see and a story that turns on it, or a painter whose failing eyes changed the way he worked. A blindfold used as a bare emblem, with no story behind it, was left out.
12. El Greco, Christ Healing the Blind (about 1570)
A blind man kneels barefoot on a checkered pavement, his head tipped back, while Christ presses the fingertips of one hand to the man's eyes and raises the other. The eyes themselves stay hidden under Christ's fingers.
El Greco, a painter from Crete then working in Italy, made the picture around 1570, when he was about twenty-nine. He set the healing in a public square, in front of a crowd. At the left edge a half-naked man seen from behind points at the sky, and on the right two men hold out open hands toward Christ while others lean in behind them to see.
El Greco had painted the subject before, in a version now in Dresden, and setting the two side by side shows what he changed. In Dresden the blind man grips a long staff, and a dog, a gourd and a sack lie on the pavement in front of him.
In the New York version, the one in the Metropolitan Museum, the staff is gone. Where the dog, the gourd and the sack lay, El Greco put two figures cut off at the waist by the bottom edge, a man in green and a woman with a bare shoulder.
Those two are the people nearest the viewer, and both have turned their heads away from the healing. The foreground that once held a beggar's belongings now holds witnesses who are not looking, a few feet from a man who is about to see.
At a Glance
Artist: El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Greek (1541 to 1614)
Painted: About 1570
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 119.4 × 146.1 cm (47 × 57.5 in)
Where to see it: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Gallery 619)
About This Painting
How did Jesus heal the blind man that El Greco painted?
In John's account of the man born blind, Jesus spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle. He spread it on the man's eyes and sent him to wash in the pool of Siloam, and the man came back seeing (John 9:6 to 7).
Was El Greco's The Miracle of Christ Healing the Blind always known as his work?
No. It was first recorded in 1888 as a Tintoretto and later attributed to Veronese. It was recognized as El Greco's only in 1958, and it is the only one of his three versions that carries no signature.
11. Nicolas Poussin, Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (1658)
Orion, the giant hunter of Greek myth, strides barefoot through a wooded valley with a bow in one hand, though he cannot see where he is going. A small man in a yellow tunic rides on his shoulders and points the way. The giant was not born blind. Someone put out his eyes, and he is now walking toward the one thing that can give them back.