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Caravaggio, Boy With A Basket Of Fruit, 1593-1594
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A German man saw that painting and he came out of the closet so hard it landed him in the hospital.
Stendhal Syndrome | The Point Magazine
Magherini describes the case of a 53-year-old German man who was hospitalized after repeatedly viewing Caravaggio's Bacchus at Uffizi Gallery. The patient felt "an attraction closer and closer to an intimate sexual arousal of ambiguous nature that invaded him and made him feel good and bad." Unmoored and distressed, he sought medical attention. After treating the subject's initial episode, Magherini writes that he came to recognize his latent homosexuality.
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In 1979, Dr. Graziella Magherini, a psychologist at Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence, coined the term "Stendhal syndrome" to describe a pattern of psychological abnormalities she and her staff observed in tourists treated in her ward.
At historic sites across the city—particularly the significant museums and churches—tourists were experiencing symptoms ranging from minor physiological disturbances, including shortened breath and heart palpitations, to significant psychological distress manifesting in panic attacks and hallucinations.
In her 1989 book, La sindrome di Stendhal, Dr. Magherini presented her statistical methodology and detailed 107 case studies observed between 1977 and 1986, thereby cementing Stendhal syndrome in psychological discourse and popular imagination. The most extreme examples of Stendhal syndrome share a sensation of self-fragmentation.
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Another case involved a young art student from Prague, who, while viewing the Masaccio frescoes at Chiesa del Carmine, had a violent physical reaction and the characteristic sense of disassociation. By the time he saw Dr. Magherini, he was no longer able to speak, regaining the ability only after months of therapy.
A 2009 article in British Medical Journal Case Reports describes a 72-year-old artist who realized his lifelong dream of visiting Florence. Standing on the Ponte Vecchio, he suffered a psychotic episode marked by a dissociative relationship with time and paranoid hallucinations. He feared his hotel room was being bugged and monitored by the airlines. The symptoms went untreated and gradually resolved in the weeks following his return home.
Four years later he traveled to the South of France (with no intention of returning to Florence) and suffered a full relapse. He was treated with bed rest and mild sedatives, and the symptoms passed, returning only when he was stressed or sleep-deprived. Wounds left by art scar over, it seems, but they remain for life.