Julie Cheminaud

Julie Cheminaud
Period: 2015-2016
Profession: Art historian Julie Cheminaud was born in 1982. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, she is an associate professor and PhD.  After lecturing at the University of Paris Sorbonne as teaching assistant (allocataire monitrice) and as temporary teaching attaché and research assistant (ATER), she is now teaching in secondary schools in the Paris region. Her thesis on the philosophy of art, to be published by Vrin entitled
Les évadés de la médecine (‘Fugitives from Medicine’), focuses on the medical figure of the artist in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. In unraveling the links established between discourse and practice, she has demonstrated how the writer and the painter were, according to the value that different forms of positivism attributed to pathology, sometimes praised (when excess proved fruitful) and sometimes condemned (when their abnormality was described as sickly). In this sense, the physiological figure of the artist reveals a variation of the traditional melancholy that consents understanding the works of modernity in a new light. During her stay at Villa Medici, Julie Cheminaud will focus on an essay concerning the  Stendhal Syndrome referring to the state of crisis affecting some tourists faced with the works of the Italian Renaissance. She indicates the phenomenon of contemporary spectators plagued by delusions or hallucinations: they live an extreme aesthetic experience, which has been described at times as deviant. The aim of this research is to reassess the direction of these symptoms, and go beyond a merely psychoanalytic reading to test a hypothesis: the shock felt had its origin in the works themselves. The Stendhal Syndrome might thus reveal the strength of artistic experience.