ABOVE: detail from Cellini’s Perseus With the Head of Medusa, the scale of which leads some doctors to diagnose the artist as syphilitic.

So Cellini was kind of on a massive ego trip when he was working on Perseus With the Head of Medusa, a megalomania brought on by galloping syphilis. And Michaelangelo was suffering from gout, his knees depicted in a painting by Raphael as swollen by uric acid buildup in his joints. And Vincent van Gogh was an epileptic, manic-depressive alcoholic who was addicted to digitalis. So is pain good for art?

Dr. Paul L. Wolf, a clinical pathologist at the University of California, has found that yes, it is quite possible that chronic pain, and the wacky substances people take to relieve it, may have a large impact on the creativity of great artists. That’s what he argues in the latest issue of the Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, and it caught the eye of Forbes yesterday. Van Gogh’s love of yellow? Just the absinthe screwing with his vision. Cellini’s monstrous masterpiece? Mercury poisoning. Kind of takes the wonder out of it all. But progress is progress: artists, line up here please in front of the guy with the baseball bat. You’ll be feeling more creative in no time.

LINK: Forbes > Did Pain Add Power to Great Works of Art?