“The eyes are the gate­way to the soul.” Was Her­man Melville sim­ply stat­ing the obvi­ous with this
famous quote, or was he onto some­thing a bit more — for lack of a less Woody Allen-esque term –
meta­phys­i­cal? What­ever the case may be, star­ing at the Mona Lisa today prob­a­bly has an equally
stir­ring yet hyp­notic effect as it did when it was first unveiled in the early 1500’s. Inter­est­ingly, peo­ple
are usu­ally so cap­ti­vated by her eyes that they totally miss the fact that the hori­zon is unevenly split on
her right and left side. Da Vinci was sure to have had a good laugh at this com­mon over­sight, but, even
in the avant-garde art world in which we live, the eyes are what we are drawn to mostly and more often
than any other aspect of a work. We relate to them, almost as if in some sort of thought-driven
dia­logue. Per­haps that is part of the rea­son why the eyes and vision con­tinue to be one of the most
philo­soph­i­cal aspects in the sci­en­tific arena today, just as they were in Da Vinci’s par­a­digm. There
truly is an art to every science.