ABSTRACT
Scholarly disputes as to whether or not there was a period which we call the Renaissance have been going on for quite some time. Nobody would deny, I think, that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries some significant new beginnings were made in Italy and gradually spread over large parts of Europe. On the other hand, no serious student will doubt that a great deal of continuity from medieval culture and views colored what was believed, said, and shaped in the Renaissance. Whether one stresses the new or the old in the period, the original or the traditional, depends to
a large extent on what particular aspect or subject we are discussing. Blindness is not a central theme in Renaissance imagery. Neither in
literature nor in the visual arts is much attention paid to the sightless person. To the student of Renaissance culture, particularly in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this seeming lack of interest in the blind, and their world shaped by this defect, remains a puzzle. We hardly know of a period in which vision was so highly valued as in the Renaissance. Intact eyesight was not only a crucial good in human life (so it was considered at all times), but was also thought to be "a genuine and indispensable organ for the understanding of reality."1
