Blindheit in der Kunst

How have artists depicted blindness, and what meanings do blind figures carry in the visual arts? Blindness has always invited metaphor: of beginnings and the birth of ideas, of hidden knowledge and art conceived in darkness – but equally of death.

The modes of depiction change over the centuries. Otto Käfer offers the first systematic survey of the subject as a whole, selecting from more than 3,000 works of painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and sculpture, from Roman catacomb painting to the present. Among the groups he distinguishes are portraits of blind sitters and of artists who portrayed themselves as blind, blindness as fate, as punishment and as grace, the healing of the blind in both physical and spiritual terms, and the blindfold as an attribute of allegorical figures such as Amor, Death, Fortuna, Justitia and Synagoga.