The Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics will present Grand Rounds on Monday, December 4, from 4:30 pm to 6 pm in the Health Sciences Center, Lecture Hall 3. Vincent de Luise, MD, will discuss “With an Artistic Vision: Further Inquiries into Perception, the Arts and Eye Disease.”
Are humans “hard-wired” to perceive beauty? Are there foundational neurological underpinnings to aesthetics? The field of neuroaesthetics is blossoming, and this talk will explore some fascinating sidebars at the intersection of vision, perception and the arts. An overview of visual archetypes in the history of art will be followed by an examination of the optical problems of self-portraiture. The synesthesias relating to music and color will be discusses, and the talk will conclude with an analysis of the artistic oeuvre of Monet, Degas, van Gogh, El Greco, Goya and O’Keefe, positing the question: Is eye disease an obstacle or an opportunity for artists to manifest their full artistic genius?

Vincent P. de Luise, MD, is an assistant clinical professor of ophthalmology at Yale University School of Medicine and adjunct clinical professor of ophthalmology at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he also serves on the Humanities and Medicine Committee and Music and Medicine Initiative. He is physician program chair of the Connecticut Society of Eye Physicians and is on the teaching faculty of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery. Dr de Luise is also a clarinetist, president of the Connecticut Summer Opera Foundation, and co-founded the annual classical music recital at the American Academy of Ophthalmology. As a Harvard fellow, he has been engaged in developing a national humanities rubric for medical school pedagogy.
For more information, contact bioethics@stonybrook.edu or call (631) 444-8029.
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