Caravaggio and the Imagination
Over at Nancy Nordenson’s “Just Thinking” website (http://justthinking.typepad.com/nordenson/2012/01/caravaggios-angels.html), she describes going to art lecture about the Baroque artist Michelangelo de Mersi Caravaggio. Actually, this talented writer and friend (who is well worth reading) is “just thinking” about the imagination, a topic I have been “dwelling in” these last weeks.
As it turns out Caravaggio has been a favorite artist of mine for years. I wrote my first SPU workshop piece about encountering (upended actually) Caravaggio’s St. Matthew series that still exists where it was created on the walls of the Contarelli chapel. (Within Rome’s Church of the French Congregation ) I agree with Nancy that one of Caravaggio’s “hooks,” his appeal to generations of viewers, was his use of visual metaphor. The artist at work concentrates on the “angel appearing on the canvas” while only partially aware that he dwells in a host of subsidiaries–ideas from books, people, and places seen in the past, previously painted angels–all integrated by his imagination into the always imperfect painted artifact. I am reminded that all artists never have “down” time. All that I read, see, or do–despite how disparate or removed from my intended project–increases my subsidiary awareness or my “tacit knowing.” It is the integration or looking through my subsidiaries, my previous “knowing,” that allows me to re-form and “create.”
But seeing Caravaggio’s work also reminds me that my imagination is also a mysterious passage that allows me to touch a bigger reality. By all accounts Caravaggio’s life was a moral train-wreck. But oddly, this fact comforts. As I struggle to fashion a written or visual metaphor, seeing his exquisitely rendered felon now with wings (most of Caravaggio’s models were “criminals or street people”) or the dead Virgin with dirty feet reminds me that my imagination is not my own. Both the gift and the operation come as grace.