My colleagues Maxim and Lisa went to Florence to search for the answers and received a great opportunity to record an interview with a person who was first to introduce the term “Stendhal Syndrome” to the world, Prof. Graziella Magherini. The interview has been recently translated into English and analyzed in the framework of an EHU’s course “Cultural Heritage Studies” with Assoc. Prof. Stsiapan Stureika. The material collected in Florence allows us now to get a broader view of what is Stendhal Syndrome and why it is much more than a medical diagnosis.
Prof. Magherini is a Florentine psychiatrist who spent years studying the symptoms observed among tourists, mainly foreigners, who came to Florence during 1980s and 90s. She introduced Stendhal Syndrome in her book with the same title in 1989. The Syndrome refers to a complex of responses, psychic activities brought about by observing a work of art. It is described as a series of sudden attacks of acute mental suffering lasting from a few hours to a few days caused by an encounter with a work of art. Prof. Magherini writes about it in the following way:
“The crises ranged from panic attacks entailing physical discomfort, thus the fear of fainting, suffocating, dying or going mad, […] with the sudden yearning or a compulsion to return home, a longing for the family, and in some cases even an intense feeling of alienation and the extremely unpleasant sensation that the world around them had now become threatening and even hostile […] One constant emerges — a crisis of identity”.
The state of mind defined in this way always emerges in the book accompanied by a specific historical place or a work of art in Florence that appears to be the main cause of such intense psychic experience —a trigger.
There were many cases studied by Prof. Magherini over the decades of the research. In her book “I’ve fallen in love with a statue” (Mi sono innamorato di una statua), she shows a lot of interesting descriptions of her patients’ experience. In order to give you an example of what are the manifestations of the syndrome and how it practically happens, I have chosen some of the descriptions from the book and share them below:
“The young Czech painter Kamil had hitchhiked to Italy – but with evening clothes in his backpack as though he had come to take his customary place at a ceremony of some sort. He was a very fine painter, and when he went to see Masaccio’s work in the Cappella Brancacci, upon exiting he had an experience that was at once aesthetic and ecstatic, a feeling he was exiting from himself, dissolving away. He collapsed on the steps. He told me that in that moment of panic and prostration the only thing he could think of was his bed at home in Prague and being spirited straight to the safety of home and family”.
Another similar passage describes the experience of a girl from Northern Europe:
“The young Nordic tourist, Brigitte, accustomed by her country to an austere Gothic, was entrapped by the sublime sensuality, and the colours, of Beato Angelico, which, she said, were like Matisse”.
The studies took place specifically in Florence and have a tight connection to the Santa Maria Nuova hospital where Prof. Magherini was working for a long time. It is here that she met many of her patients who eventually contributed to the studies of this peculiar Florentine disorder. Over 10 years the total number of studied cases counted up to 107. It looks like the atmosphere of the city of Florence plays a very important role in the manifestation of this psychic state. Indeed, to the question of how the name of Stendhal came up in relation to the symptoms, Prof. Magherini revealed us that in the very beginning of the studies she together with her team named the state Mal di Storia translated as History Sickness. From the interview:
“Initially we all thought it was “History sickness” caused by the concentration of such a big number of historical places in Florence”.
But how is it all connected to Stendhal? The Syndrome’s name is related to the personal experience of Stendhal described by him in the book ”Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio” which eventually inspired Prof. Magherini very much. Upon visiting Florence in 1817, Stendhal writes about arriving in the city in the following way:
“The day before yesterday, descending the Apennines toward Florence, my heart was beating fast. How childish. Finally, at a turn in the road, I looked down onto the plain and far off I saw a sort of dark mass, Santa Maria del Fiore and its famous dome, Brunelleschi’s masterpiece. I said to myself: There had lived Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci! There is the noble city, queen of the Middle Ages!”.
Later on, the writer describes the episode that has already become the most famous in the discussion of the Syndrome. He writes about his feelings after visiting the Basilica di 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[…] I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations […] Everything spoke so vividly to my soul […] I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they called ‘nerves’. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling”.
The visit to Florence was both an aesthetical and deeply personal experience of Stendhal as a lonely traveller of the 19th century. In the interview with EHU’s students, Prof. Magherini mentioned that she felt that what Stendhal described in his diaries was very relevant to what she observed working with her patients, Florentine tourists of the 20th century.
From the interview with Prof. Magherini:
“…Then Stendhal’s trip to Italy came to our mind, and specifically the date of 17th of January when the famous writer visited [Basilica di] Santa Croce and almost lost his consciousness. For this reason, we coined his name to this crisis striking people when they are on a trip encountering art masterpieces”.
This is how the initial History Sickness has turned into Stendhal Syndrome in the studies of Graziella Magherini. The syndrome appears to be a lot more than a medical diagnosis. It is a deep relation between Art and Psyche. It is a manifestation of an intense experience evoked by art in a person’s mind. There is, obviously, a lot more to be discovered about human nature and the capacities of our minds through the studies of Prof. Magherini.
We are happy to present to EHU community one of the first products of the records collected in Florence — an interview with Prof. Magherini, a person who introduced Stendhal Syndrome to the world.
Interview and filming: Maxim Ermolenko, Lizaveta Shakhno, Riccardo Senatore (Italian Institute of Culture in Vilnius)
Translation: Riccardo Senatore, Anastasiya Halaburda
Subtitles and video editing: Bahdan Zhuikou
