Half tickets, or my prescription against the Stendhal syndrome

    Art is to the soul what Rossio is to Betesga (*). This is why art is given to us in small sips, allowing us a moment for a sigh, for the soul to breathe. Perhaps this is why a poem is divided into stanzas, through which we progress only when we are ready, and a vinyl record has two sides, which we flip only when and if we have the strength to do so.

    It’s no accident that concerts, theater performances, and movies always have an intermission. Here, because multiple souls are simultaneously absorbing art, a supreme calculation is required to determine the moment when most of them will statistically need to sigh, which will be the moment of the imposed intermission. Otherwise, theaters and cinemas would have to pause the performance at minute ten for one soul to jot down a fabulous line, at minute twenty for another soul to catch its breath after a moment of great tension, and at minute forty to recall a certain passage from the beginning of the play that is now significant.

    These reflections overwhelmed my spirit halfway through a visit to the Pinacoteca di Brera, in a moment when my soul, battered and frustrated, fiercely rebelled against museum directors who, my soul realized then, are the authors of an outrageous mistreat.

    Surely museum directors know that a museum exhibition requires our soul to approach a painting and scrutinize it calmly, to appreciate each detail by its own accord, to be fascinated by the stippled texture and the shining gold of the saints’ halos, to concentrate on the story of each work, to absorb the features of every character depicted, even the secondary ones. The invitation is made by the painting itself to our soul. It does not penetrate the soul like an arrow, unlike music, and it does not address distant actors before addressing us, like cinema. 

    Thus, it is natural that halfway through an exhibition, we feel exhausted, as if our energy and curiosity have been drained, and we can only glance abstractedly at a full wall, including in one sweep the painting on the right, the one on the left, and all those in between, in an indistinct blur. Distressed by the recognition that some of those paintings that we are barely seeing are surely as beautiful as the first ones, we can only consciously accept the risk of losing that beauty forever.

    Such was the exhaustion with which I left the Pinacoteca di Brera that my friend, whom I met afterwards, did not hesitate to diagnose me with Stendhal syndrome. Given my usual hypochondria, I was pleased to discover a name for my condition. Stendhal syndrome is a psychosomatic illness that causes accelerated heart rate, dizziness, fainting, confusion, exhaustion, and/or hallucinations, often occurring, they say, in tourists overwhelmed by so much beauty in Firenze. According to the president of Friends of Firenze, about ten to twenty people a year present this clinical pathology.

    There is a movie named after this syndrome, whose first fifteen minutes (before it turns into a heavy horror film) show a journalist entering the Uffizi Gallery and starting to hallucinate with the artworks: hearing, as if inside the painting, the breath of the Venuses, the neighing of horses in great battles, the rumbling of drums, feeling the scrutinizing gaze of the characters directed at her, trying to feel the fresh grass and lichens of the oil paintings, being stunned by the scream and strangled by the hair of Caravaggio’s Medusa, noticing the detail of a shipwrecked person, of whom only the legs are visible, until she begins to see the ceiling frescoes spinning and collapses, hypnotized and feverish. I, who merely felt tired, say in defense of my exhaustion that halfway through the exhibition I had already added to the visual representation of sadness that I will forever carry, the expression of Mantegna’s Lamentation, and to the representation of anguish, Fabriano’s Crucifixion. These are powerful images that fully justify the soul needing the rest of the day to recover.

    My soul rebels against museum directors, who, being aware of all I have described, never offered me “half tickets” or tickets that would allow me to note, “my soul stopped at painting X,” so that I could return the next day or within a limited period to appreciate the other half, starting from the painting where I had paused. Museum staff could sign the ticket, verifying that we stopped exactly at that spot, and if the museum had employees who genuinely cared about the state of the visitors' souls, they could suggest interrupting the visit at the first sign that the soul is giving up on reading the explanations of the paintings, or at the first entirely absorbed gaze.

(*) This refers to a Portuguese expression which symbolizes the act of doing something impossible like putting the big Rossio Square inside the small Betesga street, in Lisbon.

    Mantegna’s Lamentation        Fabriano’s Crucifixion