In 1989, Professor Graziella Magherini, a Florentine psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, made her name with the publication of The Stendhal Syndrome, addressing clinical instances of queasiness, disorientation, heightened sensitivity, and panic in people confronted by great works of art or architecture. Named after Stendhal, the pen name of Marie-Henri Bayle, best known for his novels The Red and the Black and Charterhouse of Parma, whose diary contained an account of his visit to the Church at Santa Croce, where he fainted in sympathetic response to a painting. This affliction, also dubbed Hyperkulturemia or Florence syndrome, is a psychosomatic illness that can cause rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations, usually when a person’s viewing art that is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world, or when overwhelmed by the viewing possibilities presented by Netflix.
Stendhal was a notoriously sensitive fellow and notoriously obsessed with Mathilda, Countess Dembowska, who treated him wickedly, and for whom he wrote On Love, and in general a wry wit with a pulpy heart. “If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us,” being one of his. His books are full of it—love that is—and people acting poorly because of it, or nobly, but always in the service of this idealized affection, is strictly speaking, romantic love in De Rougemont’s sense (from his book, Love in the Western World), a type of love born out of the Cathars and troubadours in the twelfth century, and a type of love that some would say has since gone the way of the dinosaurs, a chaste and pure love that De Rougemont views as ultimately a love of death. However, in On Love, Stendhal describes or compares the “birth of love”, in which the love object is ‘crystallized’ in the mind, as being a process similar or analogous to a trip to Rome. This notion of love crystallizing came to Stendhal while visiting the salt mines of Hallein in 1818:
“In the salt mines, nearing the end of the winter season, the miners will throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later, through the effects of the waters saturated with salt which soak the bough and then let it dry as they recede, the miners find it covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The tiniest twigs no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw are encrusted with an infinity of little crystals scintillating and dazzling. The original little bough is no longer recognizable; it has become a child’s plaything very pretty to see. When the sun is shining and the air is perfectly dry the miners of Hallein seize the opportunity of offering these diamond-studded boughs to travellers preparing to go down to the mine.”
But isn’t there something ersatz about this sort of beauty?
This symbolizes for Stendhal a person’s transformation from an ordinary individual to the perfected object of love, to be delighted in and adored, but—isn’t the crystallized object of desire also simultaneously still a simple leafless twig? How long would your vision of this crystallized person last if you were living with them day in and day out?
It’s an alienating iconography, in which the loved object is completely other and must remain so, becoming a stand-in for all that is holy and all that is profane, “a still small sound,” and simultaneously “diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff”. The object of affection is always both the leafless twig and the crystals scintillating and dazzling, but only the latter because of our love, and therefore almost arbitrary and unnecessary. Any person could take the place of Countess Dembowska, but to acknowledge this fact is to either put your vote in for the devout path or the peep show.
In Italy, the magnetism of museums is irresistible. The Roman Institute of Psychology released the results of a national study involving 2,000 visitors that found 20 percent of them had embarked on an “erotic adventure” in a museum. Also according to the study, a Caravaggio painting or a Greek sculpture is more likely to lead to sex than works by Tiepolo or Veronese. The experts have even compiled a hit parade of Italian museums, listing the institutions in order of their ability to awaken Eros. This state of emotional arousal has been called the Rubens Syndrome, a term derived from the sensuous, superannuated nudes painted by the Flemish Old Master.
Statistics show that as desirable pickup spots, museums rank higher than nightclubs (where 18 percent of respondents reported encounters) and are surpassed only by trains (22 percent) and beaches (43 percent). A lead article in the Italian daily Il Gazzettino responded appropriately: “Who would ever have said that the corridors of the Accademia Museum in Florence were more erotically charged than the atmosphere in a discotheque? That Botticelli’s Primavera instigates hard-core thoughts and actions, and that the rooms of the Guggenheim Museum in Venice are more stimulating than Viagra?”
The researchers, who completed the project say that the Rubens Syndrome is a spontaneous response to the beauty of art and that those who are afflicted by it do not enter a museum with sex specifically on their minds. The report observes that a viewer calmly taking in a work of art is particularly predisposed to erotic suggestion, and unsurprisingly, classical scenes depicting mythological romps hold greater sway than abstract pictures. According to the controversial art critic and politician Vittorio Sgarbi (a man who often talks about his own sexual conquests), “To visit a museum, it is necessary to be able to love… At the end of the visit, there is a residue of amorous stimulation.”
Stendhal would have agreed with the first half of this statement, but not the second, and it is precisely this which differentiates those afflicted with Stendhal Syndrome to those endowed with Rubens Syndrome. To love is not necessarily to make love, and to make love is not necessarily to love, but the two have been being confused with each other since human beings first started growling in each other’s general direction. I would argue further that these two responses are specifically responses to “cultural seduction” and only secondarily concern the actual commingling of two ready partners on the one hand, or the hallucinations of someone retreating into themselves on the other, reacting as if something’s impinging upon their psyche, and in general not feeling quite themselves as a result of the overwhelming beauty that surrounds on all sides.
Perhaps the best way to think of this would be along the lines of Dario Argento’s treatment. In his film, The Stendhal Syndrome, detective Anna Manni (Asia Argento) has traveled to Florence to hunt down a serial killer (Thomas Kretschmann), but while at a museum, Anna is struck by the Stendhal Syndrome, collapsing when she is confronted by an image of Medusa’s decapitated head, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, with her terrifying expression brightly lit up, painted on a shield for the Medici Armoury by Caravaggio. It is the rapist who helps her to her feet, slipping her hotel key and pistol in his pocket while she’s disoriented.
It is the reality of what she sees that overwhelms her—that these manmade creations are too real. She hears wind and galloping horses when presented by these figures in paintings—at one point sees her reflection in the glass and tries to reach out and touch it only to set off the alarms and pull back her hand as if stung—and just after she’s looked at the Medusa head, she turns to her left and at a wharf scene, a painting with wisps of cloud superadded by the filmmaker, the camera soaring over and onto water that is now a cgi recreation. As she falls the film cuts to a shot of someone diving underwater. And when she loses consciousness, we are faced with footage of fish scouring the bottom of the ocean.
“Cultural seduction has existed since antiquity,” says Roman psychologist Willy Pasini. “Art has always activated an intensely erotic mechanism—otherwise what sort of art would it be,” but this is precisely my point—that cultural seduction is not necessarily nor even primarily about activating an “intensely erotic” mechanism, but often, and perhaps more tellingly has the opposite effect: to take the person inside themselves and to a place that is perhaps so foreign (having spent all their time at executive dinners and what have you) that the viewer experiences a sort of vertigo when faced with their own reflection in these artifacts of the species.
Confession time. I have been known to suffer from a kind of hypnagogic hallucination wherein I believe myself visited in the night. Whoa. You just said that. I did.
It’s a tactile hallucination and it is convincing enough to, even after years, find me fooled in the moment. It only happens when I am on my side or stomach, never on my back, but the person is not necessarily or clearly behind me. I am always of a sense that I can almost grasp the outline of her shape, and occasionally feel something like hot breath on the cheek or what seems like an alien heartbeat behind my shoulder blade. Why do I bring this up?
Because art is just one channel for the religious experience. It is how we channel this experience into objects, but our understanding of the numinous so beautifully described by Rudolph Otto in his masterpiece, The Idea of the Holy. Specifically, it means, "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring."
To understand the Stendhal Syndrome, and the Rubens Syndrome for that matter, we must think in terms of mysticism and its manifestation.
Or to put it another way. What the viewer is experiencing when overcome by one of these syndromes is a response to the numinous of the modern realist post-Enlightenment world. Think of museums as a collection of divine artifacts of both the traditionally religious and secular worlds, and the Stendhal Syndrome begins to look like a religious experience in a dogma-less universe.
(We have our dogmas of course, but none of them are the all-encompassing dogmas of religion. They more often than not simply speak to the ‘how’ of things. E.g. “All men are created equal.”)
And the Rubens Syndrome? Because the various types and kinds of ecstasy have always been confused.