Windows to the Soul (Eyes in Painting)

What you are looking at

Some twenty strips and squares, each showing a pair of eyes or a single eye cropped from an oil painting, are fitted together into a grid. The eyes belong to young women and men, children and old people. Some look straight out; some glance sideways; one pair, under a furrowed brow, stares in alarm; another, rimmed in red, holds a tear. The skin around them ranges from porcelain pink to deep olive and brown, and in several the fine network of cracks in old varnish is visible. Colors of iris run from pale gray-blue to near black.

The effect is uncanny. Cut out of their faces, the eyes still seem to look back at the viewer.

The idea

The phrase "the eyes are the window of the soul" is proverbial and goes back at least to antiquity; Cicero wrote that the face is the image of the mind and the eyes its interpreters. Painters have long treated the eye as the point where a portrait comes alive. Renaissance and later treatises on painting advised artists to give special care to the catchlight, the tiny reflection that makes an eye look wet and alive, and to the edge of the lower lid.

Collages like this one circulate widely online, especially in the dark academia aesthetic, which prizes old paintings, close details and melancholy moods. The sources are rarely credited. Among the works such grids often draw on are Mona Lisa, Fallen Angel by Alexandre Cabanel, whose angel weeps a single tear of rage, Medusa by Caravaggio, and Van Gogh's self-portraits, such as Self-Portrait (1889). We have not confirmed which paintings are used in this particular collage.

Close looking

Look for the catchlights: in almost every eye there is a single small white highlight, placed on the upper part of the iris. Painters added it last, with the tip of a fine brush, and its position tells you where the light in the original picture came from.

Notice too how many of these eyes are wet: a line of pink or white along the lower lid suggests moisture, the trick that separates a living gaze from a doll's. And in the cracked examples you can see that the eyes have survived centuries of aging varnish, yet still hold attention.

Where to see it

This is a digital compilation with no single original. For the paintings themselves, see Dark Academia and Famous Paintings of Women, where many of these faces appear in full.