An Attack of the Nerves, or a Plea to Redefine Stendhal Syndrome

Still from La sindrome di Stendhal (1996) Dir. Dario Argento.

While researching my forthcoming short film, Paris Syndrome, I took a detour into a related obscure syndrome: “Stendhal Syndrome.” The latter syndrome has entered the public consciousness to some degree, having graced the screen in the form of a Dario Argento horror film, and having been name-checked in various novels and art reviews. The syndrome is a psychosomatic illness resulting from viewing too much art; in specific viewing too much art in Florence. I’ve never really been clear on what happens to suffers; but as I understand it, they may pass out, get dizzy, or have a nervous breakdown. They may even hallucinate.

But why name a syndrome with roots in Italy after the French author of The Red and the Black? Before he was known as “Stendhal,” the young Henri Beyle travelled to Italy, and during his stay in Florence he visited the Santa Croce Basilica. In his 1826 travelogue, Rome, Naples, Florence, we can read of his reactions to one of the paintings he saw there:

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 intentions of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of the Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (the same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of the nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. (Emphasis Stendhal’s. From the 1959 translation. p. 302)

The Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini was the first to make a connection between Stendhal’s “attack of the nerves” and similar disturbances experienced by tourists in Florence. In 1991, she published La sindrome di Stendhal and an exotic syndrome was born.

I was due to interview Dr. Magherini for Paris Syndrome, but because of time constraints while shooting, I wasn’t able to schedule a meeting. Most of the Stendhal material has been cut from the final edit, but one question remained: the event Stendhal wrote about -- the massive reaction to the Santa Croce paintings -- did it even happen?

Stendhal published Rome, Naples, Florence in 1826. However, Stendhal took his trip in 1811, during which time he kept a diary. The novelist Julian Barnes notes the fifteen-year gap in his book on death and agnosticism, Nothing to Be Frightened Of. As he points out, other than the fact Stendhal went to Florence, the diary and the travelogue agree on very little.

Barnes first questions the veracity of Stendhal’s story by pointing out an obvious problem: in the travelogue the author approaches Florence during the day and raves about the beauty of Brunelleschi’s dome glinting in the sun. In the diary, Stendhal arrives at five in the morning, exhausted. He would not have been able to see the dome in the dark.

Barnes continues. In the 1826 book, Stendhal arrives in January. In the diary, it’s September. In 1826, he gushes about being in Florence, but in 1811, he made immediate plans to depart the day after he arrived. It seems a delay in transportation services to Rome was the sole reason he stayed three days, not an overwhelming love for the city.

In Paris Syndrome, I wanted to show the actual paintings that brought on Stendhal’s palpitations. Several sources mention that Stendhal fell into ecstasy over Giotto’s murals. However, Stendhal makes no mention of Giotto in his journals or the travelogue. Instead, Stendhal viewed paintings by Bronzino and Volterrano. The former he mistook for Guernico, and although he eventually tears up over the Bronzino anyway, the confusion leaves him “annoyed.”

But it was the Volterranos in the Santa Croce’s Niccolini Chapel that supposedly worked their magic on Stendhal. So I looked for images of them in two libraries and online, and much to my own annoyance, I could not locate a reproduction. There were those Giottos Stendhal should have looked at (in our own modern estimations), but the Volterranos were absent. History had demoted the painter to the fine print.

But what did Stendhal write of the Volterranos in 1811? He makes little mention of them. What about the “attack of the nerves?” Here’s the passage, quoted by Barnes, instead speaking of the Bronzinos:

I was dead tired, my feet swollen and pinched in new boots -- a little sensation which would prevent God from being admired in all His glory, but I overlooked it in front of the picture of limbo. Mon Dieu, how beautiful it is!

If the diaries are to be believed (more on this below), almost nothing happened in the manner told by Stendhal’s travelogue. (At least in its Florence passages.) Then why the difference? And what about the supposed syndrome? Is it based on something that never happened?

I can think of several explanations. First, perhaps Beyle did have the experience, and simply omitted it from the diary. The diary’s tone is more reserved than the later book, but his near fainting still seems to be the most personally significant thing to happen to him while in Florence. Why leave it out?

Or maybe the experience did not happen and Stendhal consciously added it as an embellishment to his travelogue. He is a novelist after all, and it does make for a better story. But why change dates and other minor details?

Then again, the diaries could be a fabrication too. At first I thought this was out of the question, but one footnote indicated the theory wasn’t so farfetched. In the English translation of the diaries, there is a note from the editor after the following sentence by Beyle: “Florence was the limit of my travels in Italy in my early youth; I went there with General Michaud as his aide-de-camp.” The note reads: “There is no record of a trip to Florence during Beyle’s first stay in Italy, and it difficult to see when such a visit could have been made.”

But there is a final, more interesting possibility: maybe Stendhal really did believe that he was overtaken by the work he saw fifteen years before. Barnes eliminates the possibility of a “false memory,” but I think he does so too quickly. After all, aren’t most trips dressed up and reedited by our memories? Aren’t most retrospective travelogues a kind of embellishment of a journey’s actual tedium, disappointments and missed opportunities?

If so, I would like to recast Stendhal Syndrome. Rather than understand it as a psychosomatic reaction to the sublime, maybe we should understand it as an unconscious rewriting of our past journeys. The symptoms? Twelve-hour plane rides are justified to friends in glowing terms. Thousands of dollars of debt are explained by several hours on a depopulated beach. Teary-eyed testimonies of how we were really, really moved by seeing the actual Mona Lisa from several dozen yards away. We are like Stendhal in our recollections, but like Beyle in our experiences. That, perhaps, is the madness Stendhal gave us. Travel almost never lives up to our expectations, and neither does the past.