In 1817, while visiting Florence, Stendhal was seized with fierce palpitations of the heart after leaving Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel in the Church of Santa Croce. He wrote in his book, Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio: “I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” In 2018, at the Uffizi, a tourist stood in front of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and suffered a heart attack. A few years earlier, the Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini had diagnosed this condition, naming it the Stendhal Syndrome—a problem visitors suffered in Florence while viewing great works of art. In Greek, the word syndrome means convergence.
In the novel, The Caravaggio Syndrome (now available in English after several reprints in Italy), three characters—art historian Leyla, her queer student, Michael and the 17th-century Utopian philosopher Tommaso Campanella—converge around Caravaggio’s 1607 painting, The Seven Acts of Mercy. Leyla carries around Campanella’s books “like an amulet,” while Michael shares her passion for the painting and for Pablo, the father of her child. Campanella’s writings influenced the cultural environment of the early 17th Century, and Caravaggio’s Mercy painting was commissioned by an association in Naples that shared Campanella’s philosophical beliefs. Thus the magic is woven throughout the book: a whirlwind of passion, scholarship, mysticism, astrology, natural magic, dreams, fantasy, repentance and obsession. It is an exploration of the physical and spiritual, Baroque and sublime, amoral and pure, light and dark. Just as Caravaggio’s paintings illuminate these two states of being, and Campanella explored them through his writings during his 27-year prison sentence, so, too, do the other characters grapple with their own restless souls.
Caravaggio’s paintings are based on historical events, but his genius is in bringing these events alive. Using natural light, silent space, deep black void, blood red, absorption and immersion, he blurs the boundaries between the work of art and the viewer. His paintings are a performance. You stand in front of them and become transfixed by their deep bewitching power.
“Every detail of the painting opened a gateway into another universe… as if toward a black hole,” Leyla muses at one point, wondering if “a similar fate had befallen Tommaso Campanella.” From his prison cell, Campanella was secretly teaching the same man who had commissioned a painting by Caravaggio, now sentenced to death. Michael, the third protagonist in the novel, views the painting that “appeared before him like an ancient mastodon, high and mighty. Michael began to gaze at the image of Pero, the woman nourishing (breastfeeding) her chained and imprisoned father, and noticed for the first time the small crown of fabric that she was wearing like a sliver of the moon.”
It is in these details that the author, Alessandro Giardino, creates a world rich in detail with a well-founded reverence and extensive knowledge of Caravaggio’s works. An Associate Professor of World Languages, Cultures & Media at Saint Lawrence University, Giardino was born in Naples and studied at the University of Bologna, UC Berkeley and McGill University. He has written extensively about Caravaggio’s cultural circles and about Italian and French literature.
In a series of conversations, we discussed The Caravaggio Syndrome, Caravaggio’s work and Giardino’s life as a scholar.
How did the book come about?
It came about organically as a number of inner motives converged, and writing a novel seemed the only rational thing to do. I wanted to make my research accessible to a larger audience, particularly to share some groundbreaking findings on one of Caravaggio’s most famous paintings. I also wanted to combine the syntactical and lexical musicality of modernist literature while maintaining a pace and visual feel of cinema. It was also a linguistic challenge. I’m Italian, I teach in English and, at home, I speak French.
Why did you choose to focus on The Seven Acts of Mercy?
It’s a painting I’ve studied extensively because of its remarkable qualities. A funny fact—even Wikipedia considers me an expert on this painting! This work has been an obsession of mine for several reasons. First, it exemplifies the unique moment of transition between the Renaissance and the Baroque, where the divergent worldviews of these two periods converge, resulting in a synthesis that is both original and nearly impossible to replicate. Second, it serves as a masterful example of Caravaggio’s innovations, notably his blending of diverse visual and textual traditions. He ranges from classical antiquity and medieval hagiography to Renaissance iconography while simultaneously portraying the realistic life of 17th-century Naples.
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In The Seven Acts of Mercy, Caravaggio’s groundbreaking manipulation of light goes beyond the traditional chiaroscuro. He explores the inherent light within objects—well before Giorgio Morandi—and anticipates photographic techniques. The painting holds immense historical significance. Even though Caravaggio had been in Rome, his distinctive approach became the ultimate reference for a transformative school of painting.
How so?
His style of painting was between the Renaissance and the Baroque. Neo-naturalism. A movement of transition. The Renaissance was based on texts of the Bible and followed previous examples. Baroque opened up to science and the Jesuits. In the first thirty years of the 1600s, the art of Naples changed because of Caravaggio. Art was in every church, and it became a place of pilgrimage for artists. Pagans and saints were in the paintings, bringing the viewer into the picture as never before.
What do you think about the book now?
I still think of it as a painting and a well-accomplished one. By well-accomplished, I don’t mean talent—it would be ludicrous to comment on my own talent—but rather the time and dedication given to each sentence and chapter. The novel not only revolves around Caravaggio’s painting but also functions like a Caravaggesque painting in its own right, much in the way a Guercino painting might. The book combines in content and style Caravaggio’s oscillation between the sublime and the sordid, and his ability to work across different historical periods, collapsing them into a singularly dramatic pictorial scene.
What has been the response to the book?
Readers comment on its flow and lexical richness. And as expected, readers become attached to different characters. I appreciate how the book has found a niche readership among art historians worldwide. I’m particularly gratified by its reception in the LGBTQ community, where it seems to have offered a refreshing alternative to contemporary queer novels with their simplistic takes on identity and identity politics. Two years after its Italian publication, the book continues to circulate and sell purely by word of mouth. I love that this happened after I left social media and became invisible to the world.
Who are your favorite writers and artists?
This is the impossible question—a bit like being asked about your favorite cuisine. Writers I have studied in depth are Giorgio Bassani, Françoise Sagan and Marguerite Yourcenar. I converse with them inwardly much in the way religious people might commune with their favorite saints. It’s amusing that several critics have likened my writing to a mix of Michael Cunningham and Umberto Eco. I’ve always found Eco’s novels too pedantic for my taste. In the book, I deliberately avoided any overt display of erudition. That’s a challenging task when dealing with historical, philosophical and art-historical research.
Are you working on another book?
Yes, I am currently working on a second novel in which a French libertine returns to France after a prolonged absence. Like my first novel, it will intertwine historical fiction with a contemporary narrative. While readers may recognize my voice as a writer or my penchant for speculative fiction, the new novel will focus on the evolution of French high society, with a tone that often borders on social satire.
What occupies your thoughts these days?
I recently acquired a Garzanti volume titled La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy. It has two thousand “authentic recipes.” Since I am on an academic sabbatical until August, I plan to try at least half of them while exploring their historical variations.
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