TY - JOUR AU - Takaes de Oliveira, Ianick PY - 2020/05/28 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - One touch of Venus. Notes on a cardiac arrest at the Uffizi JF - Figura: Studies on the Classical Tradition JA - Figura: Stud. on the Class. Tradit. VL - 8 IS - 1 SE - Dossier DO - 10.20396/figura.v8i1.13579 UR - https://econtents.bc.unicamp.br/inpec/index.php/figura/article/view/13579 SP - 115-149 AB - <p>A recent cardiovascular event at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence in&nbsp;December 2018 involving an elderly Tuscan male gathered significant&nbsp;media attention, being promptly reported as another case of the so-called&nbsp;Stendhal syndrome. The victim was at the Botticelli room the moment he&nbsp;lost consciousness, purportedly gazing at the Birth of Venus. Medical&nbsp;support was made immediately available, assuring the patient’s survival.&nbsp;Taking the 2018 cardiovascular event as a case study, this paper&nbsp;addresses the emergence of the Stendhal syndrome (as defined by the&nbsp;Florentine psychiatrist Graziella Magherini from the 1970s onwards) and&nbsp;similar worldwide syndromes, such as the Jerusalem, Paris, India, White&nbsp;House, and Rubens syndromes. Their congeniality and coevality speak in&nbsp;favor of their understanding as a set of interconnected phenomena made&nbsp;possible partly by the rise of global tourism and associated aestheticreligious&nbsp;anxieties, partly by the migration of ideas concerning artistic&nbsp;experience in extremis. While media coverage and most art historical&nbsp;writings have discussed the Stendhal syndrome as a quizzical&nbsp;phenomenon – one which serves more or less to justify the belief in the&nbsp;“power of art” –, our purpose in this paper is to (1) question the etiological&nbsp;specificity of the Stendhal syndrome and, therefore, its appellation as such;&nbsp;(2) argue in favor of a more precise neuroesthetic explanation for the&nbsp;incident at the Uffizi; (3) raise questions about the fraught connection&nbsp;between health-related events caused by artworks and the aesthetic&nbsp;experience.</p> ER -