Can You See Pain in Works of Art?

Art Muses, a great blog I've recently discovered, has an interesting item about a Forbes magazine article by a pathologist who "believes illness due to various causes can be seen in the art work of such great artist as Michelangelo, Raphael and Vincent Van Gogh."

I left this comment:

Whether one can actually see pain in works of art or not, I do think that the experience of pain often causes people to turn to art and that it may actually enhance the work of artists.

This is true not only of visual artists. I think of how C.S. Lewis, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney, for example, all had to deal with the deaths of their mothers when they were either children or pre-teens. My feeling is that pain such as this makes artistic expression attractive: It gives the artist some sense of control, some dominion of their own creation, in a world that is very much out of our control. They can imagine a different world. Or, in bitterness, they can portray the world they see around them in vivid, imaginative ways.

Does that seem true to you?