If you have a great talent for art, there's no feeling equivalent to being able to appreciate the finest crafts and visual skills you've ever had eyes on. As people's minds evolve throughout history, so do the types of art they work on. What is even more impressive than the variety of masterpieces created by people is their heavy impact on one's mind.

Florence syndrome – more commonly known as Stendhal syndrome and/or hyperculture, is a psychosomatic disorder that "causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion, and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to an experience of great personal importance, especially watching art." "Temporary insanity" is just one of the many severe symptoms associated with this disorder.

The term "Florence syndrome" was coined in 1817 by the French author Henri-Marie Belle in the nineteenth century, and his pseudonym "Stendhal", as the term was named after a negative experience the author experienced when he was 34 years old while visiting Santa Croce Cathedral in Florence. There, Giotto's famous frescoes on the ceiling made a deep impression on Stendhal: "I was in a kind of euphoria, from the idea of being in Florence, near the great men whose tombs I saw. Immersed in contemplation of sublime beauty... I have reached the point where one experiences heavenly sensations... Everything was clearly speaking to my soul. Oh, if only I could forget. I had heart palpitations, which in Berlin they call "nerves". Life has drained me. I walked scared of falling."

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Stendhal's experiences are recorded in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Regggio. Since the author shared his experiences, incidents related to the syndrome have occurred, most of which occurred in the widely famous Uffizi exhibition in Florence. Eventually, the condition was given its name (Florence syndrome) by Italian psychiatrist Dr. Graciela Magherini during her tenure as head of the psychiatric department at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence in 1979. The doctor's diagnoses for tourists visiting Florence turned out to be very consistent: panic, attacks and brief bouts of hysteria.

Magherini named this disorder the same experiences that the French author went through during his visit, and later recorded more than 90 cases, mostly those hospitalized between 1977 and 1986. All this she wrote in her 1989 book La Sindrome di Stendhal. According to Magherini, the syndrome has been defined as "an underlying mental or psychological disorder that manifests itself as a reaction to battle paintings or other masterpieces."

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106 cases were documented by Dr. Magherini and were classified into three (3) types: Type I: Psychotic symptoms were observed in 70 patients, which include paranoia, hallucinations, and non-embodied sounds. Type II: Depression, anxiety, and other emotional symptoms were observed in 31 patients. Type 3: Physical anxiety was documented in 5 patients, which includes prolonged sadness, irritability, and panic attacks.

According to Magherini, previous psychological problems were already present in 38% of type I patients, while just over half of type II patients also had them. There have been very few publications about Stendhal's work, but a recent case surfaced in 2009, which was published by Dr. Timothy Nicholson and some colleagues in the British medical journal Case Reports. This particular condition saw the development of paranoid transient psychosis in a 72-year-old man after learning about Florentine culture.

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In a 2005 paper published by Brazilian neurosurgeon Edson Amancio, there was evidence that Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky suffered from Stendhal syndrome when he was looking at Hans Holbein's painting "The Dead Christ" while visiting the museum in Basel. In another case in the 2010 issue of the British Journal of General Practice, Dr. Ian Bamforth claimed that Marcel Proust had also had a seizure of Florence syndrome at one point, and that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, both psychologists, had observed experiments that fit the description of the same syndrome.

Although Stendhal syndrome has been classified by many medical experts and psychiatrists as a disorder, it has not yet been recognized by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. According to a report from the Daily Telegraph, an Italian team is currently working on proper diagnosis by observing the reactions of tourists while taking a look at the artworks on display at the Medici Palace in Florence.