Did Stendhal really suffer from the Stendhal syndrome?

If you enter the French writer’s name on Google, the second link to come up (after Wikipedia) is not to his novels, but to the so-called Stendhal syndrome. Coined by the psychiatrist Graziella Magherini in 1989 to describe a psychosomatic malaise or breakdown in tourists affected by art in Florence, the term is derived from Stendhal’s account of his reactions to the church of Santa Croce in his 1826 book Rome, Naples et Florence. The expression caught on, spreading well beyond the psychiatric field and now crops up regularly in travel blogs and Florence tourism sites as well as art journalism, though it’s been called into question by those who’ve read more of Stendhal than the brief passage on which Dr Magherini’s ‘syndrome’ relies.

What Stendhal described initially is a state of excitement that many travellers and art-lovers must have experienced. In the early 19^th century (before Giotto was rediscovered by the art-world), Santa Croce was famous mainly as the burial place of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo, and as such it was Stendhal’s first port of call the minute he arrived in the city. Having seen the tombs, he asked an attendant monk to unlock the Niccolini chapel for him. Left alone there, he sat down on the kneeler of a prie-dieu with his head tipped back against its book-rest to gaze up at Volterrano’s painted ceiling and the Sibyls at each corner. ‘I was already in a kind of ecstasy,’ he writes, ‘at the mere idea that I was in Florence, and in proximity to the great men whose tombs I had just seen.’ Absorbed in the contemplation of ‘sublime beauty’, he reached that peak of emotion in which ‘the heavenly sensations generated by art meld with passionate feelings.’ By the time he left the church, he was experiencing heart palpitations (or what in Berlin, he says, would be called a fit of nerves), and felt so faint that he was afraid of falling. A not unsurprising result of sitting with your head tipped backwards, a realist might say.

However, unlike the distressed tourists treated by Dr Magherini, Stendhal neither sought nor needed medical attention. Wisely, he sat down on a bench in the fresh air and took out a book by the poet Ugo Foscolo that he’d brought with him (a significant choice as we shall see). Reading Foscolo’s verses about the tombs in Santa Croce (of which he proceeds to quote some forty lines in Italian), Stendhal found ‘a friend who shared my emotion’. Summing up the experience later, he concludes, a little defiantly, that a heart capable of such feelings contributes more to one’s happiness than the highest worldly honours. As far as Stendhal is concerned, then, it seems that, far from being a cause for concern, his brief physical malaise was on the contrary a reason for self-congratulation.

Unfortunately, where the man himself sees a proof of his artistic sensibility, and a literary critic recognises familiar tropes of Romantic writing, a psychiatrist spots symptoms. But using Stendhal’s name to label a medical condition does him an injustice, pathologising an experience which was actually a source of joy. Unfortunately, in the age of the Internet, there’s no escaping it now that entering the term on Google produces over 835,000 results.

What interested me when I first read the Santa Croce episode in Rome, Naples and Florence, as it did the writer Julian Barnes who discussed it in his 2008 book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, is that it’s not Stendhal’s first account of that experience and that the earlier one is very different, though Barnes and I draw somewhat different conclusions from our reading of the differences.

After his first visit to Santa Croce on September 26, 1811, twenty-eight year old Henri Beyle (who hadn’t yet invented the pen name by which he’s now known) filled fourteen pages in his diary the following day. Writing rapidly, in the present tense like a 21^st century teenager, he describes his first hours in the city with breathless excitement, punctuated by some typically Beylian irony. Having hired a servant to guide him, he sets off in a thunder storm, but it’s not Michelangelo’s David or any of the top ten Florence tourist sites he heads for, but the tomb of a recently dead poet and dramatist, Vittorio Alfieri, to whom he wishes to pay homage. The church, its weathered brick façade not yet faced in white marble, has the humble appearance of a barn, he notes, but inside (OMG!!! he’d be texting now) Alfieri rests between Michelangelo and Machiavelli with Galileo opposite. It almost makes you want to be buried, he jokes. His awe is tempered by dissatisfaction, however, as he finds something to criticise in each monument.

His next stop is the Niccolini chapel where (to his surprise since art to that point has generally left him unmoved), he’s ‘enraptured’ by Volterrano’s painted Sibyls, particularly the one who resembles Minette, a young German woman he’d been in love with four years previously. Finally, though he’s exhausted after a cold, wet, sleepless night on the road, he agrees to see one more painting — a huge crowded canvas showing the newly-risen Christ releasing the dead from Limbo. Moved almost to tears, which fill his eyes as he writes, he feels he’s never seen anything so fine. Even the Sibyls fade in comparison. It’s by Guercino, his servant mistakenly tells him, a painter whose work Beyle had recently discovered in the company of his current love, Angela Pietragrua, a connection which no doubt heightens his response.

Never before, he writes next morning, had a painting given him such pleasure, despite the fact that he was half dead with fatigue and his feet were killing him in tight new boots. It had left him in an emotional state for the next two hours, until his afternoon at the Uffizi revived his critical spirit. He was annoyed to learn that the ‘Descent into Limbo’ wasn’t by Guercino after all, but by Agnolo Bronzino whom he’d never heard of. Nonetheless, he was determined to see it again. But when he went back to Santa Croce the following day, he couldn’t recapture his first exaltation. His favourite Sibyl still charmed him, but she wasn’t perfect and the paint on her arm was yellowing. Worse still, when he returned to the ‘Limbo’ a man of the people came up and started to explain it. ‘I told him to get fucked and walked away disdainfully,’ he wrote. The experience was ruined.

The rest of the 1811 Florence diary is given up to criticism of Italian painting, which he finds bland, psychologically unconvincing, and lacking in expressivity. Scorning the platitudes of conventional taste, he tries to give an honest account of his reactions. After that first emotional experience in Santa Croce, the predominant note is disappointment.

So what explains the ecstasy of Stendhal’s 1826 account of Santa Croce?  Possibly the ‘coldness’ he’d regretted in his 1811 account made him anxious to capture in 1826 the full intensity of feeling that he hadn’t done justice to at the time. And no doubt over the years memory would have worked a transformation, eliminating all the superfluous details, the fatigue and disappointment, to focus on the core — his first experience of the intense emotion art can induce. This is what Julian Barnes concludes from his reading of the two versions. ‘Time,’ he writes, ‘brings not just narrative variation but emotional increase’; the truth lies in the writer’s ‘final form, not [. . . .] its initial version.’ (Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Random House Canada edition, 231)

I’m not altogether convinced by Barnes’ explanation. For a start, he assumes that there was only one visit, described in 1811 and rewritten in 1826, when in fact Henri Beyle had returned to Florence in 1814, 1816, 1819, and 1824, though he left no record of those visits. But in any case, the rapidly written, unpolished 1811 account has to my mind an authenticity that’s lacking in the 1826 version. The crucial difference between the two, I believe, is that the later account omits Bronzino’s ‘Descent of Christ into Limbo’ — for the good reason that it was no longer in Santa Croce, having been moved to the Uffizi in 1821 because, in the conservative climate of Restoration Italy, pictures of nude or half-clothed women had no place in a church. But it was the Bronzino that brought tears to Beyle’s eyes in 1811, not Volterrano’s ceiling (which he’d admitted being too short-sighted to appreciate) or even his favourite Sibyl. That’s in part why I find the 1826 version less convincing: the emotion is there, but without its main source it lacks the ring of truth. Volterrano’s ceiling and the Sibyls below it can’t support such intensity — and not just because tastes have changed. They were never more than decorative, whereas the ‘Limbo’ (whatever your opinion of Bronzino as an artist) is a subject with the drama and pathos capable of arousing deep emotion in a susceptible viewer. It’s for that reason I have made it a key moment in my portrayal of Henri Beyle in A Promise on the Horizon.

But it’s not only the art that’s changed by 1826 — so has the writer. Henri Beyle has now published three books under the pen name ‘M. de Stendhal, cavalry officer’ and it’s in this guise that he presents himself in Rome, Naples et Florence (a substantially different version of his 1817 book by the same title). The dateline on the opening page — Berlin, 2 September 1816 — reinforces the Germanic identity suggested by the name (though that mask soon slips). Apart from the name change, the diarist-narrator appears to be based on Beyle’s hot-headed younger self, taking off on a trip to Italy that he’s concealing (just as Beyle did) from the minister under whose jurisdiction he serves. In the third sentence, he exclaims happily: ‘How insane I am still at twenty-six!’

At the time of writing, however, the author himself is actually forty-three, a marked age difference which soon appears in the book’s style and tone. Almost immediately, there’s a certain ambiguity about the narrator’s identity — is it the impetuous twenty-six-year-old of the opening lines, or the more experienced and knowledgeable forty-three-year-old author who’s now lived and travelled in Italy for a number of years? Increasingly, the voice is that of an urbane older man. Monsieur de Stendhal has an entrée to distinguished social circles, since by the third paragraph Count *** has introduced him to the foremost singer of the day, and he presents himself on familiar terms with the Italian nobility (to the point where, after reading the book, one of Beyle’s friends accused him of ‘ducomanie’ or title snobbery). Vaunting his experience, the narrator claims to have spent the last six years in Italy when most visitors spend no more than six months — a claim that doesn’t quite add up, as his editors point out. Even the itinerary must be taken with a grain of salt since M. de Stendhal dates certain episodes from parts of Italy which there’s no evidence that Henri Beyle had ever visited. Details are cribbed from the accounts of other travellers, including the Italian Journey of the great German writer Goethe, who noted wryly, ‘He knows well how to appropriate foreign works’, but liked the book despite it.

As Stendhal’s British biographer, Jonathan Keates, nicely sums it up, the book is ‘an incomparable morsel of narrative fudging’, but the ‘deliberate inaccuracy’ or ‘outright lying’ scarcely matters. Indeed, it may be necessary, as we’ll see.  A modern reader has only to check a few dates in the author’s biography to realise that the ‘I’ of the opening pages is a fictive persona or alter ego — another reason why the Santa Croce scene makes poor evidence for the author’s medical condition. Dizziness, fainting fits, ecstasies are the stock in trade of the literature of sensibility and I would venture to say that the author is playing to readers’ expectations — which is not to deny the intense emotional response at its origin but merely to point out a certain literary artifice in the recounting.

But the greatest weakness in the ‘Stendhal syndrome’ diagnosis is that it looks only at the first half of the scene and ignores the crucial second half when Stendhal sits reading on his bench outside the church. The book he’s brought with him is Ugo Foscolo’s long poem Dei Sepolcri [On Tombs] and the forty-four lines that he quotes describe the poet’s emotions on first seeing the tombs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Galileo, and Alfieri. Perfect reading for a visit to Santa Croce, it would seem. But the political situation in Italy has changed since the author’s first visit to Florence, the poet Foscolo has been obliged to seek refuge in London, and to quote these particular verses in 1826 is a provocative act.

Foscolo was one of the Italian patriots who’d welcomed the young Corsican general Napoleon Bonaparte as a liberator in 1796, believing that the French seizure of northern Italy from the Austrians would lead to the creation of a unified and independent Italian republic. His fervent hopes had even led him to serve as a volunteer in the French army. But by 1807, when he published Dei Sepolcri, much of Italy had been annexed by Napoleon (now emperor of France), and Foscolo was profoundly disillusioned. Writing of the role that the tombs of distinguished individuals can play in inspiring future generations, the poet pays tribute to the great Italians buried in Santa Croce and to the city of Florence which, he says, perpetuates Italian glory even now when it has lost its military might, its wealth, its land — everything but its memories. In 1807 the poem’s reference to the ‘undefended Alps’ alluded to the many invasions Italy had suffered over the centuries and implicitly to Napoleon’s. Perhaps Stendhal thought it safe to quote for that reason. But by 1826 it could equally be read as a covert reference to the post-Waterloo settlement when much of northern and central Italy was handed back to the Austrian empire or its Habsburg offshoots.

Stendhal is well aware of the risk he’s taking. A few pages earlier, on January 15 in Bologna, a Count Radichi (almost certainly invented or disguised) had warned him: ‘You write? Be careful that you don’t get arrested’, and went on to say that for fear of exile or prison, or because they refused to submit to the censor, Italian writers were no longer publishing. ‘Thus a nation of eighteen million, the most ingenious in Europe, is silent.’ Another provocative political statement among many in this book.

The long quotation from Foscolo’s poem does omit the most dangerous words (the poet’s hope that Italy’s glory will shine forth again). Their absence is indicated by dotted lines, which elsewhere in the book serve as a mocking challenge to the censor. But if Henri Beyle (already suspect as a former official in Napoleon’s administration) hoped to keep out of trouble by concealing his true identity behind the name and fictive persona of Stendhal, he was sadly mistaken. Though the book was published in Paris, it did not escape the attention of the Austrian police, who could not fail to see that the writer and many of the Italians he meets are nostalgic for the Napoleonic years and loathe the present regime. When, a year later in 1827, Beyle attempted to return to his beloved Milan (from which he’d been expelled in 1821 for association with suspected Italian nationalists), he was given twelve hours to leave the city. And when in 1831 he finally obtained a much needed position as French consul in Trieste, the Austrian government refused to accept his appointment. His pen name had deceived no one, and neither as Beyle nor as Stendhal could the presence of this author of ‘dangerous books hostile to Austria’ be tolerated in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia or any other realm of the Austrian Empire.

Read in this light and seen as a whole, the Santa Croce episode takes on a different colour. We’re a long way from the ‘Stendhal syndrome’ here. Indeed, those heart palpitations might almost be a smokescreen to confuse the censor. (Who could take seriously an overwrought traveller who’d already confessed that at the first glimpse of Florence, ‘I felt beyond reason and gave myself up to my madness as one does with a woman one loves’?) But the intention behind the lengthy quotation from Foscolo (which Stendhal chooses to end on the words amor di patria — ‘love of country’) is unmistakeable. It’s a clear expression of sympathy for Italian patriots like Foscolo whose dream of uniting all the Italian states in one nation under a constitutional government had been crushed by the Congress of Vienna. What better response to the Austrian Chancellor Metternich’s dismissive statement in 1814 that ‘Italy’ is ‘nothing but a geographical expression’ than to quote Foscolo’s impassioned verses?

So the Santa Croce scene, I would argue, is anything but a case of psychological collapse. On the contrary, its Romantic enactment of a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance coupled with Foscolo’s lament for a subjugated Italy is a calculated and cleverly staged set-piece at the heart of a book that’s as much a report on post-Restoration Italy as an art lover’s journey. This is how we need to understand the scene, in its full historical and literary context, and not through the diagnostic framework of modern psychiatry. That there are individuals who suffer some kind of breakdown when exposed to art I have no doubt, but Henri Beyle alias Stendhal was not one of them.

FURTHER READING

Unfortunately, in its power to endlessly replicate a story, the freedom of the Internet can do as much harm as any censorship. There have been several online attempts to question the Stendhal syndrome, all seemingly inspired by Julian Barnes’ discussion in Nothing To Be Frightened Of.  The first (to my knowledge) is by the physician and poet Iain Bamforth writing in the British Journal of General Practice who sets it in a cultural history of responses to art.  See  https://www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991758  

Shortly after came “An attack of the nerves, or a plea to redefine Stendhal syndrome” by the artist John Menick in his blog  johnmenick.com/2010/01/14/stendhal-syndrome.html.

More recently, the professor of sociology and historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull, writing in the TLS online, sees through the posturing in Stendhal’s 1826 account and dismisses Dr Magherini’s diagnosis. See https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/stendhal-syndrome/

For an interesting discussion of emotional responses to art, I recommend the book Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Pictures by the art historian James Elkins, whose third chapter deals with the Stendhal syndrome. Like most readers, Elkins accepts Stendhal’s account at face value, while placing it in the context of Romantic tourism’s clichés and self-fulfilling expectations, but the book as a whole does not pathologise the genuine emotion of viewers who find themselves overwhelmed by a work of art.