EVENING. People.

Doctor Believes Diagnosis Possible From Paintings

May 04, 2000

Great artists get sick like anyone else and a professor at Georgetown University believes he can tell from their paintings what ailed people like Rembrandt and Michelangelo.

Dr. Carlos Espinel says Rembrandt suffered from temporal arteritis, an inflammation of an artery on his temple. He cites a self-portrait in Washington's National Gallery of Art.

He says Michelangelo had gout.

Espinel directs the Blood Pressure Center in suburban Arlington, Va.

Espinel found himself doing medical research on the National Gallery's self-portrait by Rembrandt.

"One has to scrutinize each brush stroke," he wrote in the British medical weekly The Lancet. "Notice that in . . . other portraits Rembrandt places the light on the right. But in the Washington portrait he puts it directly on his forehead, on his left temporal artery, as if to say: `Look at me. Look what is happening to me." '

Espinel's diagnosis of Michelangelo comes from a painting by the artist's contemporary, Raffaello Sanzio, known as Raphael. Espinel identifies as Michelangelo a prominent but unlabeled figure in a large Raphael called "The School of Athens." He is especially interested in the figure's exposed right knee and its conspicuous bumps, called tophi: deposits of uric acid salts, linked to gout.

Michelangelo, obsessed with his work, would go for days on a diet of bread and wine. Espinel points out that Italians used to process wine in lead containers, and that the artist may have been exposed to lead-based paints -- both possible causes of gout.