The act of contemplation has always carried a grand connotation in our minds. It conjures up visions of rational thinking, philosophical musings, and scientific enquiries. Anything less is dismissed as triviality. Time spent pondering the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everyday things is often written off as wasted hours. Yet, it is sometimes the smallest questions that lead to bigger discoveries. Here is one such question — why do women so rarely wear glasses in paintings from art history? Was their eyesight miraculously perfect back in the day? Men, at least, seemed to have had no such luck, judging by the abundance of bespectacled gentlemen in early paintings.
Although the first spectacles were invented in Italy around 1280, it was only in 1352 that they began making appearances in art. As with most new inventions, they not only came with an exorbitant price tag, they were also seen as an unwelcome admission of failing eyesight. Once the hurdle of social stigma had been crossed, the accessory acquired a more flattering association. It became a symbol of intellect. Early portraits featuring eyeglasses depicted scholars, philosophers, and cardinals. And yes, they were all men!
That is precisely why the question arises — were women blessed with extraordinary eyesight centuries ago? Certainly not. Women had no less trouble with their vision, but several factors kept them from either using these aids or being portrayed wearing them. For centuries, literacy was heavily skewed towards men and eyeglasses were primarily associated with reading and writing, activities largely dominated by them. Even when women wore corrective lenses, artists chose to leave them out of their portraits, preferring to emphasise their subjects’ unblemished physical attributes. A woman was expected to look attractive for the male gaze, and spectacles somehow didn’t fit that brief. The few 18th-century paintings of bespectacled women tended to feature elderly subjects, who may have conquered the social humiliation of possessing optical aids. Age seemed to have offered a certain immunity to vanity. By the 19th century, as women entered the workforce in greater numbers, spectacles gradually became a familiar everyday accessory for both sexes.
In our part of the world, European traders and missionaries introduced spectacles to the Mughals and again, it was largely used by men. Mughal and post-Mughal miniature paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries feature older scholars and emperors wearing glasses, using them to signify wisdom and intellectual authority. Bespectacled women remained a rarity. In later Mughal, Rajput, and Deccani paintings, however, royal women did show up occasionally holding pince-nez-style spectacles. In contemporary art, the idealised female figure has increasingly made way for women portrayed as they are, spectacled or not.
A commonplace accessory it may be, but when viewed through their lens, art history reveals how deeply gender bias was woven into even the smallest details of representation. Perhaps the real question is not why women rarely wore spectacles in old paintings, but why artists found it so difficult to imagine a woman whose intellect mattered as much as her appearance. After all, the problem was never their eyesight. It was the vision of the world that painted them.
