The Florence Syndrome — Overcome by Great Art
Have you ever seen or heard something so beautiful it brought tears to your eyes?
The first time it happened to me was the first time I ever attended a live performance of one of Beethoven’s symphonies, at age 14. I was overcome by the grandeur of the piece and just sat in my chair weeping silent tears of awe at the incredible majesty and power of the music. I felt so lucky to be alive and experiencing such beauty.
Florence Syndrome, or Stendhal Syndrome, occurs sometimes when people are exposed to objects or experiences of great beauty. It’s not acknowledged by clinical psychiatrists, but hospitals in Florence regularly encounter tourists who suffer dizzy spells, disorientation, rapid heartbeat, panic attacks, inability to breathe, or brief episodes of hysteria after viewing artworks in the Uffizi Gallery, Michelangelo’s statue of David, and other art around the town. It’s also known as hyperkulturemia, museum disease, and art overdose.
Between 1977 and 1986, Dr. Graziella Magherini documented 106 cases of people fainting from viewing art who were admitted to Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence, where she was Chief of Psychiatry. She dubbed it Stendhal Syndrome, because she remembered reading his earlier description of such experiences.
The French author Stendhal was the first to describe the feeling during his 1817 visit to Florence. He had just visited the graves of Michelangelo and Galileo Galilei in the Basilica of Santa Croce.
I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, . . . I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations . . . Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart . . . I walked with the fear of falling.
When Fyodor Dostoyevsky visited Basle in 1867 with his wife, he may have experienced Stendhal syndrome when viewing “Dead Christ” by Hans Holbein the Younger. She described him as being “completely carried away by it.” Dostoyevsky published The Idiot two years later, and his protagonist, Prince Myshkin, sees the same painting and cries out, “Why a man’s faith might be ruined by looking at that picture!” Followed by long passages of disturbed emotion.
On the other hand, some people describe being overcome by Florence syndrome as one of the best experiences of their lives.
I’m one of those people. I’ve been lucky enough to have felt it three times.
The second time was upon viewing Van Gogh’s “Starry Night II.” It’s not the famous one with the stars swirling around, but a calmer painting, with cooler stars in the sky overhead, and warmer house lights around a curved bay, with the lights reflecting into the water in the foreground. I was lucky to see it in person in an exhibition, and people were supposed to keep moving through the gallery, but I stood there for almost 10 minutes, again with tears silently pouring down my cheeks, because I was overcome by its beauty.
The last time was in the back of a bookstore in Morro Bay, in a small meeting room that held maybe 30 chairs. The bookstore hosted local musicians once a month, tickets $5.00, and this time there was a classical Spanish guitarist playing. Again I sat in silence while the tears flowed. He was better than anyone I’ve heard on big-city stages with tickets in the hundred dollar range. His playing was exquisite, absolutely sublime. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t famous. But I was so grateful for the whim that took me to that little bookstore that night to hear one of the best concerts of my life. (It was a decade ago, and his CD is packed in a box in a different country right now, or I’d tell you his name.)
It’s not just humans who are overwhelmed by beauty. There are many photos of bears watching the sun rise and set. Once, when I was backpacking, there was a red and orange sunset, and a black bear in the distance raised up on his hind legs and lifted his forepaws. It looked like he wanted to embrace the light, or maybe it amazed him and he was just trying to express, “Wow!”
