Rembrandt and the night watch

Optical theory
An article published in 2004, by Margaret S. Livingstone, professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, suggests that Rembrandt, whose eyes failed to align correctly, suffered from stereo blindness. This conclusion was made after studying 36 of Rembrandt's self-portraits. Because he could not form a normal binocular vision, his brain automatically switched to one eye for many visual tasks. This disability could have helped him to flatten images he saw, and then put it onto the two-dimensional canvas. In Livingstone's words, this could have been a gift to a great painter like him, "Art teachers often instruct students to close one eye in order to flatten what they see. Therefore, stereo blindness might not be a handicap â and might even be an asset â for some artists." However, among Rembrandt's greatest talents was an ability to create the illusion of full volume, the perception of which requires healthy stereoptic vision.