Why Falling in Love with Art is Good for Your Health
- sasharpe
- Mar 25
- 6 min read
As a long-time art lover, I’ve found certain paintings can transport me into a state of joyous excitement, my whole body tingling. Worry, stress, depression, and heartache suddenly evaporate.
My mind shuts down, and I no longer have rational thoughts or the awareness of anything beyond the electrifying connection between me and the object of beauty in front of me. There’s often a strong wish to grab the enchanting object and run away with it.
This surge of an overwhelming need reminds me of love at first sight, as in Richard Rodgers’ famous song, Some Enchanted Evening. (I’ve also written about this kind of reaction in certain love-bitten art thieves, but they act on it. See blog of Oct 17, 2025).
Now there is research proving that engagement with the arts is not only emotionally transporting but also beneficial for your emotional and physical health. University College London psychobiologist Daisy Fancourt, in her book The Art Cure, describes her research and shows how involvement with the arts is “the forgotten 5th pillar of health” that should be included alongside diet, sleep, exercise, and time in nature.
Just engaging in some way with art or music can improve your overall state of well-being, provide stress reduction, and improve heart health and cognitive functioning. Trudging on treadmills and sweating with weights are not the only ways to good health and a happy heart. Thankfully!
Research shows that viewing art you enjoy releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, often accompanied by endorphins and a rush of adrenaline. These hormones elevate the mood and produce the same kind of feelings and body sensations experienced when you’re in love. This experience is similar to listening to music you enjoy, and explains why audiences go wild and scream mindlessly at an exciting concert, musical, or even ballet and opera.
How Art Can Improve Your Mental Health
In addition to improving physical health, engaging with meaningful art can also produce other kinds of helpful states of mind or mental health advantages. Dopamine induces states of joyous inspiration as well as causing stress reduction (a lowering of cortisol), and can also induce a calm sense of well-being.
In a previous blog (Part IV: Thrill Seeking and the Masters of Deception), I described how I kept a copy of Matisse’s The Open Window in front of my computer, because I could always gain a joyous surge of renewed energy to carry on writing when I would run out of steam, or worse, feel royally stuck.
As I lowered my gaze and let myself be drawn into Matisse’s Open Window and the sun-washed boats bobbing on the water outside, a new idea would pop into my head, or at least a few new words to keep me going.
Matisse’s La Joie de Vivre is another one of his most famous paintings that I’ve found to be joyous and inspirational (see above). Many of his paintings can have this effect.
He was an artist who aimed to make joyful paintings, in part, to help fight off his own frequent depression and loss of confidence. Matisse, like Van Gogh, is one of those artists whose paintings also induce empathy in the viewer—a feeling of making an emotional connection with the artist’s inner states and struggles, thus enlarging one's awareness of oneself and others.
Considering the calming, comforting, stress reducing aspects of engaging with art, I am most strongly reminded of the memorable experiences I had in Paris when we moved there after my husband took a sabbatical at The University of Paris for a year. I had the daily charge of our first baby, Colin, a delightful, 2-month-old, beautiful boy.
The main problem became his getting sick, or so it seemed, because he had diarrhea all the time. I, being a new mother with no training from my own workaholic mother, was frantic. With very rudimentary French, I went from one doctor to the next to little avail. They all prescribed carrots and rice and quitting breastfeeding (though several labs proved my milk was not a problem).
In his baby-wisdom, Colin soon started dumping his daily mashed carrot-rice concoction on the floor. Perhaps he may have also noticed his little feet were turning a bright yellow-orange from too much carotene. Hopefully, this “cure” from decades ago has been abandoned.
I finally ended up at the American Hospital with an elegant doctor who spoke beautiful English and told me not to feed my baby charcuterie or horse meat, while, in the next room, the nurse dropped Colin on his head. He started screaming bloody murder, but thankfully, the tough little guy was not fatally injured. I grabbed him and ran.
Our small apartment was no retreat, since, without a washing machine or diaper service, the cramped space was festooned with wet, washed diapers hanging like stalactites everywhere, slapping you in the face every time you turned. I had one English-speaking friend I could visit, but she didn’t want a sick baby in her apartment.
My salvation was finding a sanctuary in my neighborhood in the 16th arrondissement. That life-saving retreat was the lovely Musée Marmottan near the Bois de Boulogne. Just stepping inside was like entering an otherworldly Nirvana.
The main gallery was shaped into a giant circle, with its curving walls covered in the late, great Monet’s giant canvases of water-lily paintings.
I was often by myself in the morning there and sat with Colin cooing and waving his arms on my lap, he too mesmerized by the cocoon of beauty surrounding us. I would sit there sometimes for an hour when he napped, just drinking in the serene, beautiful colors and floating white and pink lilies surrounding me. I could feel the days of fear and stress draining from my tense body, and a dreamy feeling of calm warmly washed over me.
When I had to leave, I would stand, my baby-laden body light as air as I floated along with the lilies, feeling assured that everything in our world would now be all right. Since I was an inveterate pessimist, this unfamiliar thinking must have been the result of the dopamine surge triggered by the healing touch of Dr. Claude Monet. In fact, the Monet cure must have worked since Colin’s problem, though never diagnosed, cleared up in a couple of months.
I was blown away when I first became aware of how a beautiful piece of art could cause mental illness. I sat unprofessionally wide-eyed when one of my therapy clients reported his traumatic experience of viewing art in Florence.
This young man had recently returned from his lifelong dream of a trip to Italy to see all the fabulous Renaissance art he’d studied in college. He was particularly excited to see the famous Michelangelo statue of David. When he managed to position himself in front of the giant statue, he looked up 17 feet at the extraordinary beauty of the gleaming white marble boy, every limb and gesture carved to perfection.
He felt awestruck by the magnificence of the sculpture, and his heart began pounding, his breath coming in shallow gasps. Soon he was drenched in sweat and feeling dizzy and nauseated. The glorious statue now a blurred mass of quivering marble, he was losing track of where he was and almost passed out.
Before that happened, he’d been rescued by guards and his tour group and taken to the hospital.
The immediate diagnosis of his condition was Stendhal’s Syndrome, a kind of temporary insanity or psychosomatic disorder that people can experience when overcome by the overwhelming beauty of an artwork (or of a natural phenomenon). The syndrome was originally diagnosed by Dr. Graziella Magherini in 1977, based on her work in Florence with several tourists presenting with this condition.
She based the name of the illness on the experience described by the famous author Stendhal while viewing the great art of Florence in 1817. His description sounds a lot like my client’s.
I was in a sort of ecstasy…absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty…. I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations…. I had palpitations of the heart…. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling….
I found it interesting to discover that the staff at Florence hospitals were accustomed to tourists suffering from these kinds of dizzy spells, racing hearts, and disorientation, particularly after viewing Michelangelo’s statue of David.
A more disturbing recent account of the Stendhal syndrome occurred when a visitor to the Uffizi Gallery suffered a heart attack while admiring Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting, The Birth of Venus.
Given the dramatic and powerful reactions art can produce in us sensitive humans, it’s not surprising that a successful horror movie has been based on this unique mental health hazard. And, as you might guess, it’s called The Stendahl Syndrome.
Considering the trauma that occurs with this Syndrome, I would guess that many of those affected would still rather have seen those glorious masterpieces than have been spared the unique pain of such sublime aesthetic overload. But I may be full of it!
Preview: Another way art can play havoc with your health is when art collecting becomes an obsessive passion. This is a fascinating, complex, and potentially dangerous arena that deserves its own separate discussion. Please join me next time for another art world journey into the heights of ecstasy and the depths of madness.
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Find out more about my novel, Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief: A Kate O'Dade Art Crime Novel out now!
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