ORAL PRESENTATION Open Access

O002. Did Picasso and De Chirico really suffer
from migraine auras?
Carlo Lisotto1*, Federico Mainardi2, Ferdinando Maggioni1, Giorgio Zanchin1

From Abstracts from the 1st Joint ANIRCEF-SISC Congress
Rome, Italy. 29-31 October 2015

Background
Some authors have suggested that migraine aura may have
represented an inspiration for unusual and recurrent fea-
tures of paintings by Pablo Picasso and Giorgio De Chirico.
A migraine hypothesis was formulated for Picasso’s art,
based on aura-like patterns, such as illusory vertical split-
ting and shifts of the eyes, even if the authors explicitly sta-
ted that they did not find any supportive information in
Picasso’s biographies [1]. As for De Chirico, the jagged
effect of water, the spiky silhouette of a knight, a black sun
motif intruding into an interior scene were interpreted to
be evoked by aura. Other descriptions included sparkling,
dazzling, dancing or flickering lights, fire rings, stars, and
dancing lines [2]. We looked for further evidence to exam-
ine in depth this hypothesis.

Materials and methods
We read Picasso’s biographies and De Chirico’s autobio-
graphy, evaluating their extremely numerous pictorial
works, in their different life artistic phases.

Results
In Picasso’s biographies there is no report of the artist
suffering throughout his long life from any particular ill-
ness, migraine included. Thus, the phenomenal similarity
of his works with certain hallucinatory form constants,
such as mosaic vision, illusory vertical splitting or meta-
morphopsia, cannot permit to infer the presence of
inspiring visual experiences of a specific aetiology such as
migraine, if such diagnosis is not supported by additional
evidence. The style characterizing the portraits of female
models that could resemble migraine aura seems to be
just an evolution from the previous Cubist period. As for

De Chirico, he started painting the black sun motifs
when he was over 80, an age when the occurrence of
aura is extremely unusual. Conversely, other authors
objected that the available evidence gathered from the
artist’s autobiography suggests a diagnosis of epilepsy. De
Chirico did not describe typical migraine headaches and
several of his ictal symptoms are rare in migraine, but
frequently encountered in temporal lobe epilepsy [3].

Conclusions
To prevent an inflated use of the said diagnostic attribu-
tion in pathographic studies of celebrated artists, a metho-
dological standard should be fulfilled in studies of
migraine aura as artistic inspiration. We do not wish to
subscribe to neurological reductionism, but we believe
that art criticism should ideally suggest neurobiological
links between the cluster symptoms of a given artist and
the key characteristic of the artist’s style. The diagnosis of
migraine should be supported by semi-/autobiographical
writings and/or the observations of contemporaries in
addition to the evidence derived from the analysis of the
artworks.

Authors’ details
1Headache Centre, Department of Neurosciences, University of Padua, Padua,
Italy. 2Headache Centre, Hospital of Venice, Venice, Italy.

Published: 28 September 2015

References
1. Ferrari MD, Haan J: Migraine aura, illusory vertical splitting, and Picasso.

Cephalalgia 2000, 20(8):686.
2. Fuller GN, Gale MV: Migraine aura as artistic inspiration. BMJ 1988,

297(6664):1670-1672.
3. Blanke O, Landis T: The metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico. Eur Neurol

2003, 50(4):191-194.

doi:10.1186/1129-2377-16-S1-A192
Cite this article as: Lisotto et al.: O002. Did Picasso and De Chirico really
suffer from migraine auras? The Journal of Headache and Pain 2015 16
(Suppl 1):A192.

* Correspondence: carlo.lisotto@aas5.sanita.fvg.it
1Headache Centre, Department of Neurosciences, University of Padua, Padua,
Italy
Full list of author information is available at the end of the article

Lisotto et al. The Journal of Headache and Pain 2015, 16(Suppl 1):A192
http://www.thejournalofheadacheandpain.com/content/16/S1/A192

© 2015 Lisotto et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://
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zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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	Background
	Materials and methods
	Results
	Conclusions
	Authors’ details
	References