Transcendence, Part 1

I'm reading a fascinating, scholarly account of the eccentric artistic temperment in Margot and Rudolf Wittkower's Born Under Saturn. The book is 300 pages enumerating the oddities of artists from Greek and Roman antiquity through the French Revolution.

I'm especially interested in the idea that in order to tap into the artistic element available in man's existence, perhaps these artists had to, or found they were only able to, access it by consciously or unconsciously altering their existence as compared to that default of ordinary men.