New research in fields as diverse as music, art, science and literature suggests that we’re wrong to think that great men and women achieve despite disease. Their illness in many cases is a path, rather than an obstacle, to genius. Einstein, Warhol, Newton, Cézanne, Goya, Michelangelo, Turner and Berlioz are among many whose achievements are now thought to have been influenced by disease. Conditions such as depression, autism, myopia, anxiety, chronic pain, gout, stroke and dementia heavily influenced their paths to creativity.
“Illness has affected the artistic achievement of musical composers, classical painters, creative authors, and sculptors,” says Paul Wolf, a clinical pathologist from the University of California, who specialises in investigating the effects of disease and drugs on the creativity and productivity of sculptors, painters, composers and authors. “The associations between illness and art may be close because of both the actual physical limitations of the artists and their mental adaptation to disease.”
According to Dr Wolf, Michelangelo had symptoms of gout and bipolar disorder, a form of manic-depressive mental illness. He painted more than 400 figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512, and Dr Wolf says that his paintings mirror his depression. Features of melancholy appear, for example, in the depiction of the prophet Jeremiah in the Sistine. Michelangelo’s gout also makes an appearance in a fresco by Raphael, now in the Vatican Palace, which depicts the artist with a gouty, deformed right knee.
The link between artistic achievement and depression has inspired an exhibition at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, Genius and Insanity in the West, which runs until January 16. The work of Goya, Rodin, Van Gogh, Munch and Picasso is on show. According to its organisers, melancholy is a key element in the temperaments of those marked for greatness.
But it isn’t just mental illness that is influential. Eye conditions, including short-sightedness and cataracts, have also had a significant impact on creativity. According to reports by researchers from the St Louis University School of Medicine, in Missouri, cataracts appear to have been a particular affliction of the early Impressionists. “Monet’s serial paintings of the Bridge at Giverny clearly demonstrate the effects of cataracts on painting, with the bridge slowly disappearing over time,” says John Morley, an author and professor of gerontology at St Louis. “Renoir and the American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt were also afflicted with cataracts. This plethora of cataracts among artists of this time has led to the concept that Impressionism is the world seen through cataracts. The researchers say that those who influenced the Impressionists were also affected by cataracts, and give JMW Turner as an example, while several of the works of the Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch depict a large floater which obstructed his vision towards the end of his life.
“Constable’s blue-green colour-blindness accounted for his colouring of his landscapes which are primarily yellow and brown,” says Dr Morley. He believes the fact that the postImpressionist painter Cézanne was diabetic was also influential. The artist developed a condition called diabetic retinopathy, which causes blue-green colour-blindness, and may account for some of his colour choices in later paintings, which became more subdued. Van Gogh’s famous painting Starry Night may have been the result of the artist’s epilepsy. He was treated with digitalis and the painting represents a classic example of the haloes seen by someone suffering the side-effects of this toxic drug, according to the St Louis researchers.
At Oxford, Ioan James, a professor of geometry, is writing a book in which he investigates whether 20 influential figures, including Einstein and Newton, the composer Bartók, the mathematician Alan Turing and the artist Andy Warhol, had Asperger’s syndrome, a mild autism characterised by extremely focused attention. James argues that the obsessive and repetitious behaviour often associated with autism was a positive thing in these people. “Perseverance, perfectionism, disregard for social conventions and unconcern about the opinions of others could be seen as a prerequisite for creativity, and these are also behaviours associated with Asperger’s,” he says.
Much of the research on disease and creativity has centred on historical cases, but a remarkable case reported two years ago by American neurologists from the University of California, at Davis, and published in the medical journal Neurology, shows how artistic skills can evolve from disease. It involved a woman in her fifties who developed a rare disease, frontotemporal dementia, which affected the left side of the brain. Over several years her brain gradually deteriorated and she had more and more difficulty talking. But during the same period, her artistic skills improved dramatically. Despite, or perhaps because of, her illness she was able not only to paint but to sell her work. It was described by the research leader, Dr Bruce Miller, a neurologist from California University, as some of the most beautiful he has seen.
Exactly how it came about is not clear, but the left side of the brain is involved with language and words, while the right side is more involved in visual creativity. One theory put forward by the neurologists who treated her was that the decline of the left side took the shackles from the right, allowing more creative freedom and experimentation: “The study of artistic development in the setting of this dementia suggests that language is not required for, and may even inhibit, certain types of visual creativity.”
They describe the case of another patient with the same disease who had no artistic talent but began to paint obsessively as the disease progressed, and the paintings improved into a distinctive style centring on the colours purple and yellow. One of his pieces, featuring a bird, won a national award in America. “By the time he painted the bird he no longer knew what a bird was,” says Dr Bruce Miller. “So this was an extraordinary evolution of language loss and visual creativity producing very beautiful, strange pieces.”
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The work of Dr Wolf and others raises issues about treatments. As he points out, the diseases and afflictions that led to creativity and genius in the past would today be mostly diagnosed, probably treated, and even cured. The painting of St George and the Dragon, by Ivar Arosenius, for example, might never have come about but for the Swedish artist’s haemophilia. Arosenius, who was known for his paintings of fairytales, died of bleeding caused by haemophilia at the age of 30. Dr Wolf says that he might have been treated successfully for the disease today, possibly losing his inspiration. “His painting Saint George and the Dragon depicts a dragon that is bleeding profusely after his slaying by Saint George. A modern coagulation laboratory would have detected the genetic abnormality for haemophilia and appropriate therapy with recombinant haemophilia factors could have been instituted,” he says.
There’s an argument that history could have been substantially changed for the worse if the conditions of the leading figures had been diagnosed and treated properly. Alan Turing, for example, is famous as the man who led efforts to decipher German codes during the Second World War. Would the course of the war have been different if he had been labelled autistic? Would Einstein and Newton have had the same kind of impact if they had been offered therapy for their condition?
Such questions will never be resolved. But research does raise issues about whether we are too negative about some conditions. Kay Jamison, a psychiatrist and writer who has suffered with severe depression, is aware of all the negative effects her illness has had on her life, including a marriage failure and a suicide attempt. But in her book, An Unquiet Mind, she comes to the conclusion that, overall, the disease was the source of much of her creativity and achievement, as well as her passion for life. Normal or manic, she says, she has run faster, thought faster and loved faster than others. “I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness,” she writes. “Strangely enough I think I would.”
Suffering for their art?
Francisco de Goya, artist, 1746-1828. A 1792 illness, possibly bacterial meningitis, left Goya deaf and depressed. The gaiety disappeared from his work and he began to paint dark, disturbing, private pieces, according to Professor Henry Claman, of the University of Colorado’s Health Sciences Centre, and an expert on medicine and art.
Andy Warhol, artist, 1928-87. The grid pattern of art he pioneered, as well as his extreme shyness and repetitious behaviour, may be clues to a mild form of autism, according to Professor Ioan James, of Oxford University. “The absolute flatness of his voice and his peculiar locutions are also indications.”
Mervyn Peake, writer and artist, 1911-68. He had a degenerative illness of the nervous system, similar to Alzheimer’s, called dementia with Lewy bodies. “Visual hallucinations are portrayed in sketches and together with paranoid delusions are apparent in poetry composed during his illness,” says the neurologist Dr DJ Sahla of the University of Toronto.
Hector Berlioz, composer 1803-69. Opium, taken to relieve agonising toothaches, may have contributed to the creativity of the French composer, according to the clinical pathologist Dr Paul Wolf (see main piece).
Albert Einstein, physicist 1879-1955. Evidence of impairments in social relationships, communication and obsessional and routine-based behaviour suggest Asperger’s syndrome, according to a commentary in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
