Blush if You Must, for Art's Sake, but Don't Panic

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Original link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/international/europe/11florence.html

	At the Museo degli Argenti in Florence, you don't see many fig leaves. At left is "Love in the Golden Age" by Paolo Flammingo, and at right, "Bacchus and Ariadne" by Luca Giordano. The show runs through May 15, 2006.
	Ornella Casazza, Director of Museo degli Argenti, dismissed with a laugh that the exhibit was a mere "porno shop," as one critic had contended.
	"The nude... is very provocative on the mind of a person," says Dr. Graziella Magherini, a top psychiatrist in Florence.
	"Venus and Cupid at Sea," 1550.
	"Aci and Galatea," 1626.
	"Salmacis embraces Hermafroditus," 1633.
	For tourists in Italy, the classical nude can seem like wallpaper, one particularly abundant commodity in the full Italian experience. The painting above the bed is Gli amori di Giove, by Alessandro Allori, 1572.
	"Cupid and Psyche," ca. 1789.

By IAN FISHER
FLORENCE, Italy - "This is a very erotic body, don't you think?" Ornella Casazza, the petite and refined director of the Museo degli Argenti here, asked a visitor to the museum's new exhibition.

The visitor was relieved that she did not really expect an answer, but her point was plain enough: the body was a nude and luxuriant Venus, painted around 1680, tended at her toilette in the clouds by a fleshy huddle of nymphs and cherubs.

It is one work among more than 200 at the museum, in a major exhibit on mythology and erotica, ranging from chastely smooching cupids, to hermaphrodites and Olympian rape scenes, to a four-foot stone penis girded spectacularly with lion's legs.

"Art can never exist without Naked Beauty display'd," William Blake wrote as part of an etching of the Laocoön - the Greek statue unearthed in Rome that inspired Michelangelo's heroic depiction of the naked body, inspiring in turn the rebirth of the nude in Western art.

Now, the naked, and the near-naked, beauty is the subject of several exhibits in Italy that expose what most adults already know well: how what we all have manages to be both profound and sort of dull.

For tourists here, the classical nude can seem like wallpaper, one particularly abundant commodity in the full Italian experience, to be chased then checked off somewhere between Chianti and Santa Croce.

But Dr. Graziella Magherini, a top psychiatrist in Florence, urges caution all the same. The nude, she warns, can be dangerous to one's mental health.

"The nude, the nude body, masculine and feminine, above all those done by the great artists," she said, "is very provocative on the mind of a person."

She is Italy's expert on strong reactions to art: 30 years ago, she began studying what she later called the "Stendhal syndrome," named after the French writer who collapsed, as he wrote after a visit to Florence in 1817, from "a pitch of excitement wherein the celestial sensations of the fine arts meet the passions."

Over 10 years, she studied some 100 cases of visitors to Florence suffering similar breakdowns after their encounters with Italy's art, architecture and history, experiencing panic, euphoria, depression, even hallucinations.

These days, her studies have zeroed in on sex, and specifically how Caravaggio's sexually ambiguous young boys have caused similar mental episodes especially in men - more broadly, how the charge of sex in great art can also overwhelm.

In a recent paper, she wrote about a young American, called Henry, who suffered from disorientation and dizziness at a Caravaggio exhibit. But it was the sight of a bare knee in a painting of Narcissus that sent him into full psychological terror.

In Milan, the brave can test their own reactions at a Caravaggio exhibit that runs through Feb. 6, with 8 works by him and nearly 150 by his followers and imitators.

Here in Florence, Dr. Magherini has turned her attention to the most famous nude: Michelangelo's "David." She is studying reactions to the "David," and has been looking particularly at a recent exhibition in which five modern works were displayed aside the classical beauty of the "David." The exhibition provoked "particularly violent and exaggerated reactions to the contemporary works," according to Francia Falletti, director of the Galleria della Academia, where the "David" is displayed. There have been no unusual reactions recorded at the new exhibit on mythology and erotica, though in theory there is time: the show runs through May 15.

An Italian newspaper called it a "porno shop," a description that Ms. Casazza, the museum director and co-curator of the exhibit, dismissed with a laugh.

"When you look at one of these paintings, do you feel like you are looking at Playboy?" she asked, and again the visitor was relieved when she answered her own question.

"No," she said. "They are different from men's magazines. This has a universal character. There is also the ability to represent the human soul."

The exhibit of art from the first century B.C. to the 18th century fills six grand rooms, and while most is tame and tasteful, there are some surprisingly explicit works: semipornographic etchings along with the stone phallus with lion's legs that was a favorite of a Medici cardinal.

In all, the exhibit seems a reminder of how much artists used to get away with, when the subject was Greek and Roman myth, most definitely not chaste. One visitor, Maria Grazia Marunti, 74, pronounced it all "boring and repetitive." Then again, she is Italian, and Italians are famously less impressed than foreigners by all that surrounds them.

"I find it odd that angelic young children are being displayed more than I thought," said Ellen Garfield, 20, a junior at Davidson College in North Carolina. "I don't ever see that in America, the sexually explicit positions."

Brian Wingfield contributed reporting for this article.
 

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