Studies show art is good medicine for a troubled world

A growing body of research tying the arts to health makes a case for prescribing visual or performing art as medicine for what ails you.

The Mass Cultural Council in Massachusetts is a state-wide partnership of hospitals, primary care providers with cultural groups. This program follows the success of “artsRX” in New Jersey.

The New Jersey program partnered with the state’s Performing Arts Center and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Also, New York City healthare workers and patients alike can participate in various arts activities, such as painting, photography, and creative writing.

Then there are companies like Art Pharmacy at Stanford University that combine prescriptions with art. As claimed by EpiArts Lab, a collaboration between the University of Florida Center for Arts and Medicine at the University College London, the arts can reduce stress and increase well-being. But wait…

What about those reports from the Uffizi Museum in Florence in 2018 about a visitor who passed out at the sight of Botticelli's painting “Birth of Venus.”

Wasn’t this art lover rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack when looking at this 15th-century painting? Mind you this didn’t happen looking at something upsetting like, say, Rene Magritte's "The Menaced Assassin" showing a nude female spread-eagled on a table while six fully clothed males stand around—one with a club.

The painting that caused an illness, “The Birth of Venus,” is an image of a golden-haired woman with movie star looks emerging from the sea and floating to shore on a seashell in perfect balance and harmony – chaste and untainted by the world.

The Uffizi calls this painting a “hymn to beauty” and deems it “one of the loveliest visions ever painted,” adding, “This is not a religious painting, and yet we are impressed by how much religious feeling there is in it.

What to think. Clearly, art – beautiful or repulsive- is not for the faint-hearted The victim at the Uffizi was unnamed but was quoted saying the experience was so intense that he suffered a heart attack.

And here's the thing. As claimed by the Art Newspaper, racing hearts in art lovers is nothing new. The condition even has a name - the Stendhal Syndrome.

This syndrome was named after the 19th-century French writer Marie-Henn Beyle who wrote of a “kind of ecstasy” while in the Basilica di Santa Croce: “I had palpitations; the life went out of me, and I walked in fear of falling.”

As he explained it, the symptom came upon him with the sudden awareness that Michelangelo, whom he worshipped for giving us the statue of David, was buried in the building.

The Daily Mail reported that an Italian psychiatrist at the Santa Maria Nuova hospital in Florence named the syndrome in 1989 after receiving several complaints of dizziness from tourists when they saw Michelangelo's David.

The Uffizi director, Eike Schmidt, told the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera of other such incidents that occur to the museum's visitors. In 2016, for example, a tourist had an epileptic fit upon seeing Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

And another tourist fainted in front of Caravaggio's Medusa. When asked why the art on display can put visitors in hospitals, Schmidt told the newspaper, “I'm not a doctor. All I know is that visiting a museum like ours, which is so full of masterpieces, can certainly cause emotional, psychological, and even physical stress.”

A cardiologist at the Careggi Hospital in Florence, where the heart attack victim was recovering, told the newspaper that doctors there are used to dealing with art lovers suffering from the syndrome.

So, the sum of all this is that art can be medicine, but like all remedies, there are side effects.