Of all the things that set humans apart from other animals, of all our inventions and ingenuity,
art might be the most unique.
In the long history of human art, from cave walls to the Louvre, few can compare to Claude
Monet.
When we talk about what makes artists like Monet special, we don't talk about their brains
or their hands, we say "they have a unique eye".
Claude Monet had a very unique eye indeed.
It was his right eye.
I promise this is about science.
We say all the time that artists see the world differently.
Monet's friend and fellow painter Paul Cezanne once said "but what an eye Monet has."
And he was right, Monet did have a special eye, literally.
Later in life he developed cataracts and the lenses of his eyes became yellow and cloudy.
To an artist like Monet, color was everything, but his artistic lens was broken.
Normal human eyes have three types of cone cells roughly sensitive to blue, green, and
red light.
But because their sensitivities overlap, and because we evolved to be active in the daylight,
our eyes are most sensitive to yellow light.
Because Monet's cataracts were yellow, they acted like a color subtracting filter taking
away even more blue and red light and enhancing the "yellowness" of everything, especially
his paints.
Paint pigments work by absorbing some wavelengths of light and reflecting others.
One of Monet's favorite blues, French aquamarine, has a reflectance that looks like this.
But his cataracts would have acted like a color-subtracting filter, taking away those
blues and reds, and leaving the scene, and his paints muted and yellow.
We can see this in Monet's paintings because he painted the same scene at different times
in his life.
The effects of his cataracts are clear.
Or not clear.
Computer simulations of Monet's impaired vision show that paintings that are completely different
to us would have been indistinguishable to him.
He might have just been throwing paint on the canvas, or painting from memory.
The worst part is that he knew that he couldn't see the world as he used to, and it must have
been devastating for him.
Eventually his cataracts got so bad that in 1923 he decided to have the lens removed from
is right eye.
And that's when he became a bee, or half of a bee.
Now we've talked before about how honeybees are sensitive to ultraviolet light, and how
the world looks completely different to them because can see wavelengths that we simply
can't see.
Humans with normal vision can't see light shorter than about 390 nanometers, but our
blue cone cells are sensitive down to 300 nanometers, down into the ultraviolet range.
So why can't we see ultraviolet light?
It's actually your eye's lens that filters out that ultraviolet light, and without his,
Claude Monet could see a bit like a honeybee, at least on his right side.
His blues would have been bluer, his violets violet-er, and his whites?
We can't even imagine what those would look like.
But luckily Monet tried to show us.
Around 1924 he painted the same scene behind his house twice, once with each eye shut.
Through his cataract-clouded left eye the world is muddy, red, and yellow.
But through his lensless right eye it's brilliant blue and violet.
Sadly, Monet never got quite used to that new superpower.
He destroyed many of his later works, and he died just a few years after having that
cataract removed.
Unfortunately it's impossible to crawl inside the brain of an artist and see the world as
they do, but the works of incredible artists like Monet become even more amazing when we
view them through the lens of science.
V.S.
Ramachandran once said that the purpose of art "is not merely to depict or represent
reality, but to enhance, transcend, or indeed even to distort reality."
And Monet did just that, he transcended and distorted reality perhaps better than anyone
else in his time, because of his brain, because of his hands, and because of his eye.
Stay curious.
Click on my super awesome Lite-Brite logo to subscribe, and special thanks to Austin's
new children's museum The Thinkery, where science and families can play side by side.
Voice-over: You are a beautiful and unique snowflake.
You are NOT a beautiful and unique snowflake.
No one else is exactly like you, you're one in a billion.
You realize that means there's like 8 people exactly like you?
Shut up!
I am a unique snowflake.