Search results
Found dead. Alfredo Grossi. Stabbed in the neck with wire, eyes gouged out, shot in the stomach, neck crushed. Anna Manni. Marie. Shot in the head. Anna Manni. Dr. Cavanna. Throat cut open off-screen.
Stendhal syndrome. Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal's syndrome or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion, and even hallucinations, [1] allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty. [2]
People also ask
What is Stendhal Syndrome?
Does Stendhal syndrome depend on region?
What are the risk factors for Stendhal Syndrome?
- Overview
- ‘I walked in fear of falling to the ground’
- A syndrome that only affects tourists
- Stendhal syndrome and ‘the uncanny’
- Is the Stendhal syndrome a real disorder?
- Not a stand-alone phenomenon
What if you were so overwhelmed by the beauty of a work of art that it made you physically and mentally unwell? Some claim that this is a real possibility, and it has a name: the Stendhal syndrome.
Only about 2 years ago, international press headlines tooted that a man had experienced a heart attack while admiring the famous painting by the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus,” which is housed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
The implication behind the headlines was not that the event had been a coincidence but, in fact, that the artwork’s staggering beauty had caused the heart attack.
Why would anyone suggest this, and is such a phenomenon even possible?
Although it may seem bizarre, there is a fairly long history behind the notion that art can be so overwhelming as to cause physical illness.
This phenomenon is now referred to as the Stendhal syndrome, a term coined by an Italian psychiatrist in 1989. Anecdotes describing the formidable effect of great artworks on the human psyche, however, date back to at least the 19th century.
To find out more about the history and definition of the Stendhal syndrome, Medical News Today spoke to Dr. Fabio Camilletti, an associate professor and reader at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom.
“[T]he one who coined the expression [was a] psychiatrist working at the [Santa Maria Nuova] hospital in Florence, Graziella Magherini, who […] witnessed over the years the recurrence of a certain kind of patients being treated for similar symptoms,” Dr. Camilletti told us.
He added that Dr. Magherini identified this as a unique phenomenon after noticing that “there was a huge amount of people — for an Italian [institution] — being hospitalized after having experienced feelings of unease in the presence of Florence[‘s] monuments, museums, and art galleries, and she believed that a [similar] experience could be found in Stendhal’s writings about Italy, and so she coined the expression ‘the Stendhal syndrome.'”
Dr. Magherini first described this phenomenon in a book she published in 1989, called La sindrome di Stendhal (The Stendhal Syndrome).
The name alludes to an episode described by the French writer Stendhal in his travel memoir Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio about the journey that he undertook through Italy in 1817.
In it, Stendhal wrote: “My soul, affected by the very notion of being in Florence, and by the proximity of those great men whose tombs I had just beheld, was already in a state of trance. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, […] I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.”
“Roughly speaking, the Stendhal syndrome can be defined as the psychosomatic [mental and physical] response experienced while facing esthetic beauty but not natural beauty — beauty as a [human] construct, so art,” Dr. Camilletti explained.
In her original research, Dr. Magherini identified three main types of symptoms in people who apparently had the Stendhal syndrome:
•altered perception of sounds or colors, as well as an increased sense of anxiety, guilt, or persecution
•depressive anxiety, a sense of inadequacy, or, conversely, a sense of euphoria or omnipotence
•panic attacks and physiological symptoms of heightened anxiety, such as chest pain
In an interview she gave in 2019, Dr. Magherini noted that, in her experience, the Stendhal syndrome was a phenomenon that applied exclusively to foreign tourists.
But does the development of the Stendhal syndrome as a concept have any ties with any other concepts or cultural phenomena that we know of?
For Dr. Camilletti, the concept is inextricably linked to other ideas that had been spreading throughout Europe, particularly those of Sigmund Freud, the famous founder of psychoanalysis.
“I think that the coinage of the notion of [the] Stendhal syndrome is [an example] of the episodes of the slow appreciation, throughout the 20th century, of Sigmund Freud’s intuitions about the uncanny, [which is] the idea of some sort of intermediate zone between proportion and disproportion, between absolute beauty and the absolutely intolerable,” Dr. Camilletti told us.
Freud defined his concept of “the uncanny” in a 1919 essay of the same name, in which he described it as an experience of contexts and ideas that seem familiar and at the same time unfamiliar, thus creating a feeling of disturbance.
“The idea there is the kind of esthetic feeling which cannot be subsumed under the categories of [the] pleasing and the displeasing — [it] is rather something else, and Freud called it ‘the uncanny,’ arguing that the uncanny is basically the strange mixture between the familiar and unfamiliar, the homely and the unhomely,” Dr. Camilletti explained.
“And I think that the Stendhal syndrome is in many ways an example of the uncanny, in that Magherini herself, when defining it, said in the first place that was the result of a cultural shock.”
While Dr. Magherini saw the Stendhal syndrome as a real psychiatric phenomenon, more recent reviews of the existing research on this topic have found that there is not enough conclusive evidence to suggest that such a disorder exists.
The current edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) does not list the Stendhal syndrome as a phenomenon or condition related to mental health.
Still, alleged cases of the Stendhal syndrome have continued to make the headlines.
A case study published in 2009 in BMJ Case Reports described the situation of a “72-year-old fine-arts graduate and creative artist” who “presented with insomnia and concerns about being followed and monitored.”
These issues had been troubling him since he had traveled to Florence, 8 years earlier, where, “While standing on the Ponte Vecchio bridge, the part of Florence he was most eager to visit, he experienced a panic attack […].”
While, according to the study authors, this patient’s symptoms resolved without requiring much in the way of targeted treatment, the researchers note that, in some people who may already be at risk of mental health issues, overexposure to art may well be a trigger.
The overactivation of certain brain areas in individuals who may be predisposed to or at risk of mental health problems may thus help explain phenomena like the Stendhal syndrome.
While this syndrome seems to affect specifically tourists who visit Florence, researchers have observed similar symptoms in tourists who travel to Paris or Jerusalem.
According to a French study published in 2004, as many as 63 Japanese individuals who had been visiting Paris became hospitalized in France between 1988 and 2004.
These tourists required psychiatric treatment after developing delusions or paranoia, seemingly as a result of their disappointment that Paris was not the perfect, dreamy, idealized city they had imagined — a phenomenon now dubbed “Paris syndrome.”
In an interview from 2007, Dr. Yousef Mahmoudia, who worked as a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, where some such patients had received treatment, said that “[a] third of patients get better immediately, [while] a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses.”
Another related phenomenon, Jerusalem syndrome, refers to the emergence of religious excitement in tourists who visit the holy places found in Jerusalem and its environs.
Oct 14, 2022 · What is Stendhal syndrome? Stendhal syndrome refers to a collection of intense physical and mental symptoms you may experience while or after viewing a work of art. According to 2021 research, it ...
- Kristeen Cherney
Aug 13, 2021 · A psychosomatic disorder, Stendhal Syndrome, causes tachycardia, dizziness, sweating, disorientation, fainting, and confusion when someone is looking at artwork with which he or she connects deeply emotionally. In 1817, a French author named Marie-Henri Beyle, whose pseudonym was Stendhal, described his experience visiting the Basilica of Santa ...
Feb 1, 2018 · Stendhal Syndrome is one of the most important examples of the impact of art on an individual's emotional state [44, 45]. It is a short-term exceptional combination of psychological and somatic ...
Feb 1, 2018 · A very rare condition, known as aesthetic syndrome and, more commonly, Stendhal syndrome, entails a clinical phenomenon in which the presence of a beautiful piece of work or architecture causes dysautonomic symptoms such as tachycardia, diaphoresis, chest pains and loss of consciousness.
