At the end of February 2020 just before the lockdown for the Covid-19 pandemic one of my patients mentioned a dream and associated it to a painting Caravaggio did for the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples in 1607. And from there started my immersion in Caravaggio’s way of painting and what I could understand of his life. He knew about illness and the plague that had affected his life when he was five years old.
I will use the painting Beheading of the Baptist (1607) that Caravaggio painted in Malta and won him the Maltese Cross to explore the affinity with the process that we call active imagination, and to the level of imagination that connects us to matter, to the body, and the amygdala.
The seminar will also amplify on some theoretical aspects, and on how art enabled the encounter with the depths of the pandemic. Analogy and amplification will be used to explore emotions and feelings emerging in the course of the reflection on the pandemic and on art.
