Stendhal syndrome: can art really be so beautiful it makes you ill?

A man is recovering from a heart attack after looking at Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus – the latest case of a medical condition thought to be unique to Florence

A visitor to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence has had a heart attack while contemplating Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The man is recovering in hospital, but it is the latest apparent case of Stendhal syndrome, a medical condition specific to the Tuscan city in which people become ill after too much beauty. I suspect the occult. Could there be some old black magic lingering in this Renaissance wonderland that gives its art a unique potency? For Botticelli may have intended The Birth of Venus as a magical spell, and Michelangelo’s David, another Florentine must-see, was accused in the early 1500s of casting an evil eye over the city.

There is substantial evidence that Stendhal syndrome is real and unique to Florence. It is named after one of the earliest recorded cases, when the French novelist and critic Stendhal made himself sick on art here in 1817. Why don’t people succumb to the same symptoms, from dizziness to heart trouble, in galleries elsewhere? In London, Tate Modern has occasionally given me a headache, but that’s more to do with its labelling. And people look at Botticellis in the National Gallery with no noticeable ill effects.

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