Odd this day
Happy 220th anniversary to a diary entry from Stendhal about how much more reliable newspapers were in the olden days:
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), however, is probably best known for Scarlet and Black, a 1972 Penguin Classics edition of which I ‘liberated’ from school because I loved it so much when I was 16. I always meant to re-read it, and finally got round to it in my late 40s. Didn’t like it at all. (And Madame Bovary, which I’d felt similarly about, also left me cold in middle age. Maybe middle age is the problem.)
Anyway… Whatever its merits or otherwise, Scarlet and Black contains this, which I still think inarguable:
The policy of the government in power, which forms the main topic of conversation in middle-class houses, is never touched on in the houses of people of the Marquis’s rank, except in moments of great emergency.
More importantly (for the purposes of this blog, at least) he’s also famous for giving his name to a syndrome, a recognition few of us achieve. (If it was rare to be obsessed with random historical trivia, I might be in with a chance, but it isn’t.) Stendhal syndrome is named after an encounter with art in his travels around Italy (in the entourage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée), described in 1817 in his Rome, Naples and Florence:
He “sat down on one of the benches which line the piazza di Santa Croce”, and found some poetry in his wallet, which he read to return him to his former equilibrium.
Then, in 1979, Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini identified a psychosomatic phenomenon which bore a resemblance to what Stendhal had experienced, and used this once obscure passage to give it its name. In 1989, she released a book (of the same name) detailing over 100 cases she’d seen. (Being based at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence, she had ready access to people who’d had a more than usually intense reaction to the great concentration of art in the city.)
One case study, which appears on her Wikipedia page, concerns an unhappily married Scandinavian woman, Inge, who “was filled with the guilt of leaving her failing father, for whom she was a caregiver”. She hadn’t been anywhere for years, and “had palpitations and saw flashes of lights” in front of a version of the Last Supper.
In Metropolis M magazine she describes Kamil, who “was very sensitive” and spent several days in Florence visiting as many of the sights as he could. In front of the Masaccio frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine,
He felt like he was suffocating. He had to leave the church and lay down on the church steps.
In each of these cases, though, especially the first, there are… extenuating circumstances. If I were a proper scientist, I might call them variables which have not been accounted for. Quite apart from what’s going on in your personal life, cramming a lot of tourism into a short time can be exhausting. Add in the fact that you may have looked forward for years to seeing the glories of the Renaissance, and that you will be packed into these places with many, many others who all feel the same… well, I haven’t read her book, so I can’t dismiss it. I do wonder, though…
(I also haven’t been to Florence, although I have visited France and seen the Mona Lisa in situ — from a great distance away, naturally, and in a room full of people taking photos of it. I am determined to get to Italy before my time is up, though, and I expect to be overwhelmed by it, if not to the extent that I require hospitalisation.)
It seems unlikely that I know more than an eminent psychiatrist, but I do feel confident in suggesting that the
…might just, perhaps, have been someone whose physical health happened to catch up with them at a specific moment. (To be clear, though, it was newspapers which flagged this as a case of the syndrome.)
Still, whatever the facts are, I think we can all agree that the best possible response to a serious work of psychiatry is to turn it into a lurid tale of kidnap, sexual assault, and multiple murder.
Well… I assume it’s lurid from that cover, from the plot summary, and from what I know of Argento’s other work. As with Florence, I haven’t seen it. I intend to find out, though. Like Florence, it’s on the bucket list.
