Archived under:

Named after the writer Marie-Henri Beyle (1783-1842), who wrote under the pseudonym Stendhal, the Stendhal syndrome (or Florence syndrome … I’ve also seen it referred to as hyperkulturemia and “art-induced overwhelm”) is a psychosomatic condition that affects individuals who — when facing aesthetic beauty — are moved to such an extent that they experience dizziness, shortness of breath, a feeling of disorientation, perhaps even hallucinations.

While visiting Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence and looking at the frescos created by Baldassare Franceschini (aka Il Volterrano), Stendahl was overcome with emotions. He described his own experience in Rome, Naples et Florence (1817):

I underwent, through the medium of Volterrano’s Sybils, the profoundest experience of ecstasy that, as far as I am aware, I ever encountered through the painter’s art. 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 could perceive its very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it beneath my fingertips. I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.
Translated by Richard N. Coe

Bibliography