Prairie dogs are color-blind to red and green, owls are entirely colorblind (because they have only rod cells), and ants don’t see red at all. The deer that stroll into my yard to feast on apples and rosebushes see me mainly as shades of gray, as do the rabbits that eat the wild strawberries on my back lawn and are tame enough to kick in the rump. A surprising number of animals do see in color, but the colors they see are different. Unlike us, some also see in infrared, or with radically different kinds of eyes (barred, compound, iridescent, tubular, at the ends of stalks). The world that greets them looks different. Horror films persuaded us that the fly’s compound eye meant that it saw the same image repeated many times, but scientists have now taken pictures through the eyes of insects, and we know that a fly sees a single complete scene, as we do, only a greatly curved one: It would be the equivalent of looking at the world through a glass paperweight. We assume that insects and animals don’t see very well, but birds can see the stars, some butterflies can see in the ultraviolet range, and some jellyfish create their own light to read by. Bees can judge the angle at which light hits their photoreceptors, and therefore locate the position of the sun in the sky, even on a partly cloudy day. There are orchids that look so much like bees that bees try to mate with them, spreading pollen in the process. This intricate and extreme adaptation wouldn’t work if bees’ vision were poor. The reason movies appear to be continuous is that they move at about twenty-four frames per second, whereas we process images at fifty to sixty per second. When we watch a movie, we’re actually watching a blank screen for about half the time. The rest of the time, many still photographs are flashed one after another, each slightly different and yet related to the preceding one. The eye dawdles over each photograph just long enough to slur into the next one, and they seem to be a single continuously moving picture. The eye persists in linking up the separate images. Bees, on the other hand, are used to images flashing at three hundred per second, so Lawrence of Arabia would be just a series of stills to them. It used to be thought that a bee’s “waggle dance” included semaphore instructions for how to get to the great feeding places the bee had just been to; but now scientists think that the waggle dance also conveys messages in touch, smell, and hearing. Although it’s true that bees can see in ultraviolet, they’re weak on the red end of the spectrum, so a white flower looks blue to a bee, and a red flower is of little interest. Moths, birds, and bats, on the other hand, adore red flowers. Flowers that look drab and simple to us—nothing but white petals—to a bee may be lit up like a billboard flanked by neon signs pointing the way to the nectar. Bulls don’t have color vision, so the bright red of the matador’s cape could just as easily be black or orange. Red is for the benefit of the human audience, which finds the color intrinsically arousing and also suggestive of the soon-to-be-flowing blood of either the bull or the matador. The bull just focuses irritably on the large object moving in front of the man and charges.
The Boran people of Kenya are led to honeybees’ nests by the pantomiming of a bird, the African honey guide (Indicator indicator). If the Boran are in the mood for honey, they whistle to call the bird. Or, if the bird is hungry for honey, it flies around the Boran, alerting them with its “tin-tin-tin.” Then it disappears briefly, apparently to check on the whereabouts of a honeybee nest, and returns to guide them with short flights and repeated calls. When the bird gets to the nest, it flies down to indicate the right spot and changes its call. Skillfully, the Boran break into the nest and take honey; they leave plenty for the bird, which would otherwise find the nest hard to invade. German ornithologists at the Max-Planck-Institut, who spent three years studying this strange symbiotic relationship, discovered that it takes the tribesmen almost three times as long to find honey without the help of the honey birds. Apparently, the birds also guide honey badgers in a similar way. Animals’ eyes may be quick and keen, but few eyes are as probing as those of the artist, another species of hunter, whose prey lives in both the outer world and the inner tundra.
THE PAINTER’S EYE
In his later years, Cézanne suffered a famous paroxysm of doubt about his genius. Could his art have been only an eccentricity of his vision, not imagination and talent guarded by a vigilant esthetic? In his excellent essay on Cezanne in Sense and Nonsense, Maurice Merleau-Ponty says: “As he grew old, he wondered whether the novelty of his painting might not come from trouble with his eyes, whether his whole life had not been based upon an accident of the body.” Cézanne anxiously considered each brush stroke, striving for the fullest sense of the world, as Merleau-Ponty describes so well:
We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects; Cézanne even claimed that we see their odor. If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must carry with it this invisible whole, or else his picture will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the insurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real. That is why each brush stroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions. Cézanne sometimes pondered for hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke, for, as Bernard said, each stroke must “contain the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style.” Expressing what exists is an endless task.
Opening up wide to the fullness of life, Cezanne felt himself to be the conduit where nature and humanity met—“The landscape thinks itself in me … I am its consciousness”—and would work on all the different sections of a painting at the same time, as if in that way he could capture the many angles, half-truths, and reflections a scene held, and fuse them into one conglomerate version. “He considered himself powerless,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible how the world touches us.” When one thinks of the masses of color and shape in his paintings, perhaps it won’t come as a surprise to learn that Cézanne was myopic, although he refused glasses, reputedly crying “Take those vulgar things away!” He also suffered from diabetes, which may have resulted in some retinal damage, and in time he developed cataracts (a clouding of the clear lens). Huysmans once captiously described him as “An artist with a diseased retina, who, exasperated by a defective vision, discovered the basis of a new art.” Born into a different universe than most people, Cézanne painted the world his slightly askew eyes saw, but the random chance of that possibility gnawed at him. The sculptor Giacometti, on the other hand, whose long, stretched-out figures look as consciously distorted as one could wish, once confessed amiably: “All the critics spoke about the metaphysical content or the poetic message of my work. But for me it is nothing of the sort. It is a purely optical exercise. I try to represent a head as I see it.”
Quite a lot has been learned in recent years about the vision problems of certain artists, whose eyeglasses and medical records have survived. Van Gogh’s “Irises” sold at Christie’s in 1988 for forty-nine million dollars, which would surely have amused him, since he sold only one painting during his lifetime. Though he was known for cutting off his ear, van Gogh also hit himself with a club, went to many church services each Sunday, slept on a board, had bizarre religious hallucinations, drank kerosene, and ate paint. Some researchers now feel that a few of van Gogh’s stylistic quirks (coronas around streetlamps, for instance) may not have been intentional distortions at all but the result of illness, or, indeed, of poisoning from the paint thinners and resins he used, which could have damaged his eyes so that he saw halo effects around light sources. According to Patrick Trevor-Roper, whose The World Through Blunted Sight investigates the vision problems of painters and poets, some of the possible diagnoses for van Gogh’s depression “have included cerebral tumour, syphilis, magnesium deficiency, temporal lobe epilepsy, poisoning by digitalis (given as a treatment for epilepsy, which could have provoked the yellow vision), and glaucoma (some self-portraits show a dilated right pupil, and he depi
cted coloured haloes around lights).” Most recently, a scientist speaking before a meeting of neurologists in Boston added Geschwind’s syndrome, a personality disorder that sometimes accompanies epilepsy. Van Gogh’s own doctor said of him: “Genius and lunacy are well known next-door neighbors.” Many of those ailments could have affected his vision. But, equally important, the most brilliant pigments used to include toxic heavy metals like copper, cadmium, and mercury. Fumes and poisons could easily get into food, since painters frequently worked and lived in the same rooms. When the eighteenth-century animal painter George Stubbs went on his honeymoon, he stayed in a two-room cottage, in one room of which he hung up the decaying carcass of a horse, which in free moments he studiously dissected. Renoir was a heavy smoker, and he probably didn’t bother to wash his hands before he rolled a cigarette; paint from his fingers undoubtedly rubbed onto the paper. Two Danish internists, studying the relationship between arthritis and heavy metals, have compared the color choices in paintings by Renoir, Peter Paul Rubens, and Raoul Dufy (all rheumatoid arthritis sufferers), with those of their contemporaries. When Renoir chose his bright reds, oranges, and blues, he was also choosing big doses of aluminum, mercury, and cobalt. In fact, up to 60 percent of the colors Renoir preferred contained dangerous metals, twice the amount used by such contemporaries of his as Claude Monet or Edgar Degas, who often painted with darker pigments made from safer iron compounds.
According to Trevor-Roper, there is a myopic personality that artists, mathematicians, and bookish people tend to share. They have “an interior life different from others,” a different personality, because only the close-up world is visually available to them. The imagery in their work tends to pivot around things that “can be viewed at very close range,” and they’re more introverted. Of Degas’s myopia, for example, he says:
As time passed he was often reduced to painting in pastel rather than oil as being an easier medium for his failing sight. Later, he discovered that by using photographs of the models or horses he sought to depict, he was able to bring these comfortably within his limited focal range. And finally he fell back increasingly on sculpture where at least he could be sure that his sense of touch would always remain true, saying, ‘I must learn a blind man’s trade now,’ although he had always in fact had an interest in modelling.
Trevor-Roper points out that the mechanism which causes shortsightedness (an elongated eye) affects perception of color as well (reds will appear more starkly defined); cataracts, especially, may affect color, blurring and reddening simultaneously. Consider Turner, whose later paintings Mark Twain once described as “like a ginger cat having a fit in a bowl of tomatoes.” Or Renoir’s “increasing fascination for reds.” Or Monet, who developed such severe cataracts that he had to label his tubes of paint and arrange colors carefully on his palette. After a cataract operation, Monet is reported by friends to have been surprised by all the blueness in the world, and to have been appalled by the strange colors in his recent work, which he anxiously retouched.
One theory about artistic creation is that extraordinary artists come into this world with a different way of seeing. That doesn’t explain genius, of course, which has so much to do with risk, anger, a blazing emotional furnace, a sense of esthetic decorum, a savage wistfulness, lidless curiosity, and many other qualities, including a willingness to be fully available to life, to pause over both its general patterns and its ravishing details. As the robustly sensuous painter Georgia O’Keeffe once said: “In a way, nobody sees a flower really, it is so small, we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” What kind of novel vision do artists bring into the world with them, long before they develop an inner vision? That question disturbed Cézanne, as it has other artists—as if it made any difference to how and what he would end up painting. When all is said and done, it’s as Merleau-Ponty says: “This work to be done called for this life.”
THE FACE OF BEAUTY
In a study in which men were asked to look at photographs of pretty women, it was found they greatly preferred pictures of women whose pupils were dilated. Such pictures caused the pupils of the men’s eyes to dilate as much as 30 percent. Of course, this is old news to women of the Italian Renaissance and Victorian England alike, who used to drop belladonna (a poisonous plant in the nightshade family, whose name means “beautiful woman”) into their eyes to enlarge their pupils before they went out with gentlemen. Our pupils expand involuntarily when we’re aroused or excited; thus, just seeing a pretty woman with dilated pupils signaled the men that she found them attractive, and that made their pupils begin a body-language tango in reply. When I was on shipboard recently, traveling through the ferocious winds and waves of Drake Passage and the sometimes bouncy waters around the Antarctic peninsula, the South Orkneys, South Georgia, and the Falklands, I noticed that many passengers wore a scopolamine patch behind one ear to combat seasickness. Greatly dilated pupils, a side effect of the patch, began to appear a few days into the trip; everybody one met had large, welcoming eyes, which no doubt encouraged the feeling of immediate friendship and camaraderie. Some people grew to look quite zombielike, as they drank in wide gulps of light, but most seemed especially open and warm.* Had they checked, the women would have discovered that their cervixes were dilated, too. In professions where emotion or sincere interests need to be hidden, such as gambling or jade-dealing, people often wear dark glasses to hide intentions visible in their telltale pupils.
We may pretend that beauty is only skin deep, but Aristotle was right when he observed that “beauty is a far greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.” The sad truth is that attractive people do better in school, where they receive more help, better grades, and less punishment; at work, where they are rewarded with higher pay, more prestigious jobs, and faster promotions; in finding mates, where they tend to be in control of the relationships and make most of the decisions; and among total strangers, who assume them to be interesting, honest, virtuous, and successful. After all, in fairy tales, the first stories most of us hear, the heroes are handsome, the heroines are beautiful, and the wicked sots are ugly. Children learn implicitly that good people are beautiful and bad people are ugly, and society restates that message in many subtle ways as they grow older. So perhaps it’s not surprising that handsome cadets at West Point achieve a higher rank by the time they graduate, or that a judge is more likely to give an attractive criminal a shorter sentence. In a 1968 study conducted in the New York City prison system, men with scars, deformities, and other physical defects were divided into three groups. The first group received cosmetic surgery, the second intensive counseling and therapy, and the third no treatment at all. A year later, when the researchers checked to see how the men were doing, they discovered that those who had received cosmetic surgery had adjusted the best and were less likely to return to prison. In experiments conducted by corporations, when different photos were attached to the same résumé, the more attractive person was hired. Prettier babies are treated better than homelier ones, not just by strangers but by the baby’s parents as well. Mothers snuggle, kiss, talk to, play more with their baby if it’s cute; and fathers of cute babies are also more involved with them. Attractive children get higher grades on their achievement tests, probably because their good looks win praise, attention, and encouragement from adults. In a 1975 study, teachers were asked to evaluate the records of an eight-year-old who had a low IQ and poor grades. Every teacher saw the same records, but to some the photo of a pretty child was attached, and to others that of a homely one. The teachers were more likely to recommend that the homely child be sent to a class for retarded children. The beauty of another can be a valuable accessory. One particularly interesting study asked people to look at a photo of a man and a woman, and to evaluate only the man. As it turned out, if the woman on the man’s arm was pretty, the man was thought to be more intelligent and successful than if the woman was unattractive.
Shocking as the results of t
hese and similar experiments might be, they confirm what we’ve known for ages: Like it or not, a woman’s face has always been to some extent a commodity. A beautiful woman is often able to marry her way out of a lower class and poverty. We remember legendary beauties like Cleopatra and Helen of Troy as symbols of how beauty can be powerful enough to cause the downfall of great leaders and change the career of empires. American women spend millions on makeup each year; in addition, there are the hairdressers, the exercise classes, the diets, the clothes. Handsome men do better as well, but for a man the real commodity is height. One study followed the professional lives of 17,000 men. Those who were at least six feet tall did much better—received more money, were promoted faster, rose to more prestigious positions. Perhaps tall men trigger childhood memories of looking up to authority—only our parents and other adults were tall, and they had all the power to punish or protect, to give absolute love, set our wishes in motion, or block our hopes.