Martien Meiland
Martien Meiland (63), known from the TV show *Chateau Meiland*, has two different-colored eyes. The black spot in Martien’s right eye is not congenital, but the result of an accident he had as a small child. It happened during an arts-and-crafts afternoon when he was four years old. “I stabbed myself in the right eye with a pair of scissors while gluing and cutting, just like kids do. It didn’t really hurt. The next morning I woke up and my whole pillow was soaking wet. The family doctor said, ‘That’s really bad. Go straight to the hospital!’ The scissors had gone all the way through my eyeball. Since that accident, I haven’t been able to see anything at all with my right eye. I spent a year in the hospital and had nine surgeries.”
© Photo: instagram.com/martien meiland/
We often see Martien on TV behind the wheel. Doesn’t it bother him when he’s driving? He spoke to the weekly magazines *Margriet* and *Weekend* about seeing with one eye: “I can imagine it would be a problem if something like that happened later in life. But I’ve never known anything else, and it doesn’t really bother me much. I do have a blind spot on my right side, though. If someone is standing next to me on that side, I can’t see them.”
According to Martien, it’s only later that many people notice he has two different eye colors. “A lot of people notice it under certain lighting conditions. The other day, someone said to me, ‘You have such beautiful eyes.’ So I replied, ‘Stick a pair of scissors in your eye, and you’ll have them too!’”
Antoon
Antoon (23), the stage name of Valentijn Verkerk, is a popular Dutch singer, songwriter, and music producer. He is best known for his catchy pop songs with influences from hip-hop and electronic music. He broke through in 2021 with songs like “Hyperventilatie” and “Vluchtstrook.”
© Photo: instagram.com/antoonpb/
If you look at photos of Antoon as a child, he had quite a noticeable squint. He told the daily newspaper *Het Parool* last year: “Maybe a little more back then than now. But I still have a squint. I’m blind in my right eye—I was born that way. I can’t perceive depth, which is why I was never much of an athlete, but I’m used to it. The reason it’s not immediately obvious that I’m blind in one eye is that the eye does move along with the other. But it does move more slowly and sometimes stays fixed on a single point. I have a limited field of vision, and I still bump into people from time to time.”
Rembrandt van Rijn
The painter Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606–1669) had a lazy eye and likely had difficulty perceiving depth as a result. This is the conclusion reached by American neurobiologists Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway of Harvard Medical School in Boston, after studying 36 self-portraits by the Dutch painter. In 24 of the 25 oil portraits, it is evident that the painter depicted his left eye as slightly asymmetrical. And in all 12 etchings examined, it was Rembrandt’s right eye that showed an abnormality.
Dr. Livingstone believes that it was not the painter’s left eye, but his right eye that was lazy, because he was painting his own reflection. In his etchings, his right eye appeared distorted, which can be explained by the fact that left and right are reversed during the etching printing process.
© Photo: vedea.com/nl
According to the two Harvard researchers, other famous painters, such as Pablo Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci, also had vision problems that did not negatively affect their artistic performance. According to Margaret Livingstone, they may have benefited from having a lazy eye when translating three-dimensional images into two-dimensional paintings or drawings. When teaching drawing or painting, students are often asked to close one eye to see the image more clearly and render it on a flat surface. Artists who see with one eye have a natural ability to focus on the shapes of objects and the space surrounding an object—often called negative space—says Dr. Conway. This gives them a natural advantage in developing “flat” images.
