Book Description

"In mid-December, 2018, a man stood before one of the most beloved paintings in Europe, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, and had a heart attack (Henri Neuendorf,ArtNet News, December 19, 2018 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/heart-attack-botticelli-uffizi-1425448). Venus is that painting you're thinking of, the one with the shapely, wheat-haired woman standing in a seashell, with one hand covering her breasts and the other holding her long, golden locks in front of her groin. Floating above her right shoulder are two winged figures with their arms wrapped around each other, who blow air on her like distant kisses. On her left stands a woman (the Hora of Spring?) who holds what looks like a drape and gazes directly at our goddess, whose face, tilted just so, looks toward the viewer with a gentle yet mature glance, as if she was born knowing all one needs to know of love and seduction. Fortunately, the man whose heart failed while looking back at our all-knowing Venus survived, but he was not the first to collapse while viewing art in Florence, and no doubt he will not be the last. It has happened often enough that there is a medical term for the phenomenon named after the first notable man to succumb, "Stendhal Syndrome." Apparently the French author of On Love, a treatise on romantic passion, reported that he fell ill in 1817 after viewing too much Florentine art (Bamforth 945). Is it any wonder that Botticelli's winged figures hang on to each other so tightly? To be awestruck is to be in imminent danger"--