I am generally opposed to promoting arts and cultural experiences as events that will make you swoon or enter some sort of ecstatic state. These aren’t common outcomes and there can be an implication of sorts that you are doing it wrong if it doesn’t happen to you. Obviously, you can have a really great time without swooning and there are many elements that can contribute to that experience that aren’t necessarily the work of art.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Aeon recently had a lengthy article on Stendhal syndrome. The syndrome is named for Stendhal, the nom de plume of Marie-Henri Beyle, who experienced
“…a fierce palpitation of the heart …; the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.’
after visiting a chapel in Florence, Italy in 1817.
While I had heard of Paris Syndrome and Jerusalem Syndrome where people experience great distress/disappointment and psychotic episodes, respective upon visiting those cities, somehow I had missed Stendhal syndrome. While it is also called Florence syndrome, it is more closely associated with experiencing great works of art than with being in Florence.
Though since it is something of an understatement to say Florence has a plethora of great art works, the hospitals of that city certainly see a number of visitors experience all types of physical distress.
Every year, a few dozen tourists to Florence are rushed to the local hospitals, literally overcome by the city’s array of paintings, sculptures, frescoes and architecture. Some lose their bearings, others lose their consciousness, yet others still, on rare occasions, nearly lose their lives. In 2018, a heart attack befell an Italian tourist, Carlo Olmastroni, as he gazed at Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi. (His life was saved by four other tourists, all doctors, who had also been standing and staring, slack-jawed, at the Botticelli.)
According to Graziella Magherini, the psychologist who in 1989 coined the term ‘the Stendhal syndrome’, dehydration and dense crowds certainly played a role in these tourists having heart palpitations and hallucinations. Yet in an interview in 2019, she insisted on another factor: ‘The psychological impact of a great masterpiece.’ Even scientists who dismiss the syndrome as psychosomatic confess that art can have this impact, though they refuse to diagnose it as a psychiatric disorder.
Robert D Zaretsky, author of the Aeon piece, says that while he visits many famous art institutions a year, he has not had the occasion to swoon. He mentions that the way people consume art these days tends to insulate them from having these feelings. Not only do most people only spend a few seconds viewing art in galleries, they often mediate the experience through cameras and social media postings rather than allowing themselves the time to experience and consider the works.
But as with so many perceived problems with arts audiences today, the complaint isn’t new. Stendhal/Beyle felt the Louvre was far too crowded with visitors squeezing through the galleries back in the 19th Century.
“Their eyes are red, their faces tired, their lips tightened. Happily, there are couches to sit on. ‘How superb!’ they declare between yawns wide enough to dislocate their jaws. What human eye can remain unaffected under the assault of 1,500 paintings?”
[…]
Not surprisingly, Beyle rebelled against the crushing abundance of paintings at the Louvre, and instead believed its holdings would be better distributed among dozens of smaller museums where people might stop and engage deeply with these great works of art rather than glance at them over their shoulders as they passed at a slow walking pace.
