“This year’s summer shows find London’s galleries steeped in paranoia, madness and the macabre.
Hallucinations, disorientation, dizziness and anxiety, feelings of vertigo: on a trip to Florence in 1817 the writer Stendhal suffered what later became known as Stendhal’s syndrome, a kind of overwhelming panic in the face of too much great art. Whether it was the masterpieces of the Uffizi that triggered it, or lack of sleep, the rigours of 19th-century travel, too many grappas or some instability that lurked within the author, we shall never know. Perhaps Stendhal didn’t know either…” (Guardian.UK)
