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Feeling overcome with emotion, speechless with admiration, panicked even, when one stands before artistic riches, was classed as a bona fide psychiatric disorder in 1989, by a doctor at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. 

The Italian city was where French writer Stendhal (birth name Marie-Henri Beyle) experienced the phenomenon in 1817, hence the name, 'Stendhal' syndrome (le syndrome de Stendhal). 

After admiring frescoes in the city’s Basilica of Santa Croce, where Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Galileo are buried, he said: 

“J’étais arrivé à ce point d’émotion où se rencontrent les sensations célestes données par les Beaux Arts et les sentiments passionnés [...] je marchais avec la crainte de tomber.� (“I had reached that point of emotion where the heavenly sensations provided by the fine arts meet passionate feelings [...] I walked with the fear of falling.�

In 2018, a visitor to the city’s Uffizi Gallery suffered a heart attack (non-fatal) while admiring Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. It may have been the art that caused the crise cardiaque, but more likely, as he told the BBC in 2022, the occlusion of two coronary arteries.

Personal experiences of le syndrome de Stendhal

The closest that I ever came to experiencing a Stendhal-esque moment of artistic admiration was before Millet’s The Angelus at the Musée d’Orsay. 

I also regularly experience the same sense of dizzying, helpless devotion when presented with a groaning plate of confit de canard and pommes de terre sarladaises, though as far as I know, this is not a clinically confirmed syndrome – perhaps it shall henceforth be named ‘the canard ³¦´Ç³¾±è±ô±ð³æ’.&²Ô²ú²õ±è;

Has a work of art even driven you to uncontrollable distraction? Tell us about it: feedback@connexionfrance.com.