Stendhal Syndrome

Study for the Composition of the Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci, 1495, Accademia, Venice

“Leonardo da Vinci, that master of polished lyrical effects, believed that many artists of his day were far too fond of their own virtuosity. “When the painter has achieved a beautiful and graceful and well-defined rendering” of the human body, Leonardo wrote, “it seems to him an outrage to raise or lower the position of the limbs, or move them further back or forward.” Leonardo urged these artists, who were so quick to reach a conclusion, to consider the heavily worked manuscripts of their literary friends: “Have you never reflected on the poets who in composing their verses are unrelenting in their pursuit of fine literature and think nothing of erasing some of these verses in order to improve upon them?” Leonardo was pressing artists to accept a kind of dialectical process, to put something down and then respond to it, to draw, to erase, and then to redraw — to do battle with the images that they had made. A work of art that holds our attention has an underlying pressure, a pressure that is distinct from but in some ways in sync with the work’s ultimate structure or design, a pressure that registers as an echo of the struggles involved in the making of the thing, a pressure that gives a saving rough edge to even the most refined creations.”

The Artist in Conflict: Ways of Thinking about Style, Jed Perl, 2003