Stendhal syndrome: theft, passion and the captivating power of art

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In the 1970s, the Florentine psychiatrist Graziella Magherini concluded that art can sometimes overwhelm people. She named the complaint “Stendhal syndrome”, after the 19th-century French author who came over all funny while looking at frescoes in the Basilica of Santa Croce. Symptoms, noted Magherini, include heart palpitations, fainting and hallucinations.

It’s alarming stuff and can apparently take different forms, as revealed in two new books that offer up possible examples. One is a tale of avarice, the other of discovery.

In The Art Thief, American journalist-turned-author Michael Finkel chronicles an illicit obsession. Between 1994 and 2001, Stéphane Breitwieser, a Frenchman in his early twenties, stole some £1bn worth of art — predominantly Renaissance paintings and objects — from municipal museums, schlosses and art fairs across Europe. His targets ranged from the Rubens House in Antwerp to a Sotheby’s pre-sale view at a 15th-century castle in Baden-Baden (where he snatched a portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder). The robberies were unsophisticated: he used a Swiss army knife to prise paintings off walls or objects out of cabinets, bundled the works into his girlfriend’s handbag or under his coat, and simply walked out.

Art thieves retain a firm grip on the public imagination, bolstered by Hollywood depictions of debonair cat burglars, daredevil raids and a lingering suspicion that bits of canvas shouldn’t be worth a fortune. The reality often disappoints. An unlikely criminal mastermind, Breitwieser lived in the attic of his mother’s home in Mulhouse, near the French-Swiss border, where he filled two rooms with stolen pictures, sculptures and silver. He didn’t sell the works: he lived with them. The hoard, writes Finkel, “could easily stock a room at the Louvre”.

Finkel depicts Mulhouse as a backwater of muted options — “one of the least attractive areas in a nation brimming with beauty” — which, in part, explains the search for splendour. And he is successful in highlighting the flimsy security of small museums and the inconsistent way in which art thefts are handled by the police and the judiciary. The final quarter of the book, detailing Breitwieser’s arrest and trial, is a startling portrait of bureaucratic incomprehension.

To destroy the evidence of her son’s crimes, Breitwieser’s mother threw works into a canal and made a bonfire out of the pictures

But the nature of Breitwieser’s attachment to the artworks remains vague. Finkel describes him as a collector, which is like calling Bernard Madoff an accountant. The author has a fondness for antisocial characters: his 2017 bestseller The Stranger in the Woods chronicled the real-life story of Christopher Thomas Knight, a hermit who spent 27 years roughing it in the wilds of Maine. But, for all the plunder, Breitwieser’s actions feel humdrum. During one robbery — or “heist” as Finkel calls it — his chief obstacle is a couple on the reception who are busy kissing. This is not The Thomas Crown Affair.

Written in the present tense, an effort no doubt to create suspense, Finkel’s rattling prose exposes the book’s origins as a magazine feature (written for GQ in 2019). Such jauntiness doesn’t work at book length. The most interesting aspect of the story is the complicity of Breitwieser’s girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, a nursing aide at a local hospital — who acted as his lookout — and his mother (who did far worse — in an attempt to destroy the evidence of her son’s crimes, she threw works into a canal and made a bonfire out of the pictures). However, in an afterword, Finkel explains that he couldn’t get access to either. Finkel’s narrative is stuck in his subject’s attic.

Laura Cumming, who is the chief art critic of the Observer, presents less malignant signs of Stendhal syndrome. In Thunderclap she details her weak-at-the-knees passion for Dutch Golden Age painting. Cumming’s volume blends art history — largely focused on Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt best known today for his 1654 masterpiece “The Goldfinch” — and an account of how her father, the late Scottish painter James Cumming, introduced her to the captivating power of art.

“To see the world transformed into two-dimensional images, materialising on the page with a 2B Staedtler, or on the canvas with a brush, is to witness a form of magic,” writes Cumming, who not only conjures up compositions in her writing but also invokes the physical and emotional experience of looking at them.

Her recollection of a youthful encounter with “A View of Delft” by Fabritius sets the tone. She recalls the pensive man in the scene: “He looked as if he might be about to remove a fleck of tobacco with practised elegance from his lips; we smoked roll-ups back then.” In one sentence she merges, like pigments on a palette, the habits of her younger self and the brooding mannerisms of a 17th-century salesman.

She writes about the paintings of Amsterdam, Delft and Leiden like a teenager might swoon over Harry Styles on tour. “Dutch art is like a reflection in a Dutch canal. It is barely passed through the filter of imagination,” notes Cumming. And yet the pristine verisimilitude belies its “transcendent charisma”.

What is absent, both in life and paint, is as important to Cumming as what is known and shown. Fabritius died in the “Delft thunderclap”, a monumental blast at a gunpowder store in 1654 that levelled much of the city. Little is understood of the artist’s life, apart from that he had lost, in quick succession, his wife and three children and that barely a dozen paintings of his survive.

The twin experiences of loss and recovery run through this book. In 2019, Cumming wrote movingly about her mother in On Chapel Sands, in which she uncovered a long-buried family secret like a conservator getting grime off a canvas. Another restoration is accomplished here as her father emerges from the page as a beacon of independent thought, a self-assurance that we see echoed in the Netherlandish talents of the 1600s. This luminous book is likely to send you, if not into a frenzy, then straight to the National Gallery.

It’s questionable whether works of art can make you ill — although Breitwieser’s thefts could be seen as a mania of sorts — but, as Cumming highlights, they can certainly be a balm.

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel Simon & Schuster £16.99, 240 pages

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death by Laura Cumming Chatto & Windus £25, 272 pages

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