Have you heard of Stephen Wiltshire? I hadn't until my mom sent me a YouTube video the other day that made my jaw drop.

Wiltshire, a British artist who is autistic, has this amazing gift to draw highly detailed, panoramic scenes of cities on massive canvasses from memory.

Here is footage of him etching Rome after a 45-minute helicopter ride over the city. He draws everything to scale and nails details like the number of columns on the Pantheon.

(Note: The video is about 5 mins. long. To skip to the part where he starts drawing like a fiend, go to 1:35.)

Wiltshire has also created giant cityscapes of Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dubai and London. He's been a bit of a celebrity in London since he was a child and was featured in a BBC documentary about autistic savants.

As you read this, Wiltshire is in the middle of working on a cityscape of Jerusalem, which will be auctioned off to help raise money for child education and autism research in Israel, according to his Web site.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks, writing about Wiltshire in his book An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, challenges the notion that savants draw purely from photographic memory:

"...As I photocopied Stephen's drawings I thought how unlike a Xerox machine he was. His pictures in no sense resembled copies or photographs, something mechanical and impersonal - there were always additions, subtractions, revisions, and, of course, Stephen's unmistakable style. They were images and showed us some of the immensely complex neutral processes that are needed to make a visual and graphic image. Stephen's drawings were individual constructions, but could they be seen, in a deeper sense, as creations?"

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