How did artists manage to depict blindness? What significance do blind or visually impaired individuals convey in the visual arts? Blindness consistently evokes a diverse range of metaphors: it symbolizes beginnings, the birth of ideas, and mysterious knowledge, as well as art emerging from the womb of darkness, but it also serves as a metaphor for death. The ways of representation have evolved over the centuries. Overall, the theme of imagery, broadly situated within European cultural history, is systematically presented for the first time: the author has selected from over 3,000 works, including painting, drawing, graphics, photography, and sculpture, from Roman catacomb paintings to the present day.