Holidays are the favorite terrain of love at first sight. It can be a real disease that even has a name: Stendhal syndrome.
The complexity of the brain probably explains the number of curious diseases that the disruption of such a machine can cause. For example, Stendhal’s syndrome. From the name of the famous writer who, during the Italian campaign – the war was one of the literary distractions at the time – fell one day in awe before the beauty of a church in Florence: “I was already in a kind of ecstasy, by the idea of being in Florence, and the neighborhood of the great men whose tombs I had just seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I saw it up close, I touched it, so to speak. I had reached this point of emotion where the celestial sensations given by the Fine Arts and passionate feelings meet. Leaving Santa Croce, I had a heartbeat, life was exhausted at home, I walked with the fear of falling. (Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence). This description of Stendhal, this feeling, this trouble felt by the traveling writer in front of the Florentine beauties, gave its name to the symptom, and this text constitutes one of the first descriptions. Since then, every year, a dozen people are victims of uncontrolled reactions to Michelangelo’s David, or Botticelli’s Venus.
It is not a disease reserved for Italian art, but in fact whenever the expectation of an emotion is very important and it is too strong. It may be in front of a place, a painting, a landscape; rarely a concert… Never a television show, I assure you.
The symptoms are always the same: dizziness, loss of sense of identity and sense of direction, severe chest pain, tachycardia and it can even go as far as depression. The “struck” goes from a state of exaltation, feeling of omnipotence to panic attacks and fear of dying. In some, this disease lasts several days and requires treatment in a specialized environment.
So, does art possess an immense force that can convey absolute emotion? One of the specialists in this syndrome even believes that we are all carriers of Stendhal syndrome and that this phenomenon remains diffuse for most of us. Under certain conditions of intimacy, a work of art functions for those who look at it as the symbol of an interior drama.
