Is there any principle for drawing (exo)deviated eyes in portrait paintings through the classic era?

In Byzantine icons there are many instances of deviated eyes and they follow certain patterns.

A notable case may be seen in the 6th-century icon of Jesus as Pantocrator, from Saint Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai, Egypt. There is a fairly high-resolution photograph of this painting here:

(You can mouse-click on this image, and on the others given below, to zoom in and get a better look at the eyes.)

The eye on the left side of the painting looks deviated because the center of the pupil was placed above and slightly to the right of the center of the iris. It seems that the artist was trying to paint two faces in one (try covering the left half, then the right), perhaps to express the dual divine (left)-human (right) nature of Christ that runs its controversial course through the Middle Ages. The result for me is a riveting, almost haunting image. The students in my art history classes tend to find it fascinating as well.

A mosaic representation of Christ from around the same time, in Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravena, also has pupils placed higher than the centers of the irises. This gives an inward-looking, mystical quality to the face. Here is a photo:

Both images use the triple circle compositional device, common in Byzantine art: the head is placed within a circle centered between the eyes; the radius is divided into three equal segments, creating a set of three harmoniously proportioned concentric circles that are used to determine the placement of the hairline, the head's contour, and the halo.

Later Byzantine images of Christ and Mary use the triple circle device, but place the center of the circles in the corner of one of the eyes, shifting the face to a three-quarters view and making one eye larger than the other, as in the famous Deesis mosaic in Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, from the second half of the thirteenth century:

This imbalance of ocular scale in the latter image gives a rather strange, mystical quality to the face. The high placement of the pupil on the right adds to this effect.

Dear David

Thanks for your brilliant answer, but here will come two more questions:

1) Is there any academic publication by you or any scholar on this rule that I can make reference to?

2) I have hopelessly checked out on Alberti, Vasari and Leonardo's essays. Is there any evidence through traditional inscriptions referring to the fact? Or is it our contemporary interpretation that due to theses tokens and compared to the Ideological paradigm we know of the Byzantine culture, this fact could be the case?

Dear Fo'ad:

The part about the placement of the pupils is based on direct observation of photographs of the icons. I've been teaching an art history course at the University of Guanajuato for the last two semesters, covering prehistoric to early medieval art of the Mediterranean region, so I've been looking at these works with my students and trying to understand how they work. In fact, your question made me go back and look at this aspect of Byzantine icons more closely. It's a very interesting topic.

You can cite my answer on this ResearchGate page. If scholars cite personal communications, they can cite web discussions, which are much better because the reader can verify what was said, as long as the page referenced remains online.

I remember first reading about the triple circle compositional device in this book:

Panofsky, Erwin, El significado en las artes visuales, 4a. reimpresión, Nicanor Ancochea, traductor, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1987.

It's a Spanish translation. The original was in English. I found this reference on Google Books:

Panofsky, Erwin, Meaning in the visual arts: papers in and on art history, Garden City, Doubleday, 1955.

If you would like to dig deeper into Byzantine art and culture, I recommend the Dumbarton Oaks web site. This is a research center in Washington, D. C., affiliated with Harvard University, with departments focused on Byzantine studies, pre-Columbian studies, and landscape architecture. You can download scholarly publications on Byzantine art here:

I don't know if any of the publications available on the latter web site have anything about deviated eyes, but they will give you a good footing in the general historical and stylistic context. There is an excellent book about the mosaics of Hagia Sophia, for example.

Perhaps the best course of action for understanding this practice would be to gather a large corpus of images, then do a statistical analysis of pupil placement and other aspects of the representations of eyes, including geographic and chronological data. I suspect interesting patterns would emerge.

Dear professor

It will be an honor to cite your web discussion in my paper.

In fact I'm working on one of the predecessors of Iranian modern painting who contrary to his other colleagues preferred to study in Italy rather than Paris. And there is a significant pattern of deviated eyes in his portraits. Now it makes sense; He might have studied the Byzantine works you mentioned.

Thank you so much for the time.

sincerely.

Thank you for making me look harder at these images.

Now I wonder what antecedents, if any, there might be in ancient art for assymetrical or off-center placement of irises and pupils in representations of the human face, and what influence the Byzantine works may have had on other styles.

I just spent about an hour clicking around in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and I found a few examples, both earlier and later than the Byzantine art mentioned above.

In the early fourth century Roman imperial artists tried to "spiritualize" official portraits of Constantine, around the time Christianity was made official. In the colossal sculpture of this emperor from his basilica in the forum of Rome, the pupils are not off-center, but a carved "reflection" in his eyes creates a similar effect. Here is a photo:

Some of the mummy portraits from Fayum, Egypt, from late antiquity, have pupils that are placed higher than the centers of the irises, and may represent a tradition that links with the later Pantocrator icon from the Saint Catherine monastery at Mount Sinai. Here are a few examples:

So it appears that the Byzantine examples of off-center pupils have antecedents in classical antiquity.

I also found an Italian Renaissance example of an off-center pupil. The intent seems to be, like the Byzantine icons of the Pantocrator, to produce an inward-looking, mystical expression on the face. The image is Pietro Perugino's Pietà from the San Giusto convent in Florence, painted in the late 15th century. Here is a detail of Mary's face:

And here is a photo of the entire composition:

The bearded saint on the right also has off-center pupils, so it would appear that the effect was intentional.

Good luck with your research! I hope to see the results on ResearchGate someday. I don't know anything about modern Iranian art, but I'm sure that it is a rich field to study.