While you enjoy the lecture stop by for a Pop-up bar open to the public. There will be beverages, including soft drinks, beer, wine and spirits, in the Glass Pavilion. Our Pop-up bar will be open to the public from 5:30pm - 7:30pm. Cash, credit and debit cards are accepted.

From falling on my face when ascending the Propylaea on the Acropolis in Athens in 1974, to being rendered agog in the presence of Etienne Liotard’s Chocolate Maid encountered in Dresden in 1984, to the inexplicable magnetism I encountered when physically in the space of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles at the retrospective devoted to the artist at MoMA in New York in 1999, to sensing something quite extraordinary when confronted with Frans Hals’s Van Campen Family Portrait at the gallery of a London dealer in 2010 – I have become overcome by works of art. This lecture will delve into this phenomenon, known as the Stendhal Syndrome, referencing personal experiences with art works by Rogier van der Weyden, Raphael, Bruegel, Caravaggio, Poussin, Rembrandt, Chardin, Goya, Ingres, and Matisse, as well as Kyoto temples, Iznik pottery, the stained-glass windows of Saint Chapelle, and I.M. Pei architecture.

This lecture will be presented by Dr. Lawrence W. Nichols, Curator Emeritus of the Toledo Museum of Art. Prior to this role, he served as the William Hutton Senior Curator of European and American Painting and Sculpture Before 1900 for nearly three decades. Dr. Nichols joined the museum in 1992 and is the first individual to be designated as curator emeritus.

In early 2024, he returned as the curator of The Brilliance of Caravaggio: Four Paintings in Focus.