The exhumation of Mattia Preti, painter.

Hallucinatory inspiration Visual migrainous hallucinations have provided inspiration for others. Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, is known to have suffered from migraine and is thought to have used his migrainous disturbances of body image as inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.'0 Atkinson and Appenzeller described a patient who had migraine who painted her complex visual hallucinations." Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1180), a nun and mystic, had countless visions that she not only described but also illustrated. Her migraine "visions" have been reviewed by Singer'2 and Sacks. It is of interest in our context that she thought that the visions were of divine origin, as de Chirico too seemed to interpret his as privileged revelations of another reality. The symptoms acknowledged by de Chirico, taken with the evidence from his writings and confirmed by independent contemporary comments, suggest that he suffered from migrainous visual hallucinations. The evidence from some of his prints and paintings, when they are compared with those of other migraineurs, suggests that de Chirico used these hallucinations as a source for some of the more striking details of his work.