Abstract
What can psychology learn from Caravaggio’s art? The chapter presents a discussion of Caravaggio’s naturalistic style, with respect to the process of generalization in the painting “The Seven Works of Mercy,” trying to identify the conceptual elements that make this work a specimen of the human condition of suffering and relieving. From this analysis, it will be argued that the process of generalization is neither an inductive-based extension nor the formulation of a context-independent and abstract list of traits. The process of generalization starts from experiencing and, through a zone of potential estrangement, it must be able to return to experience improving our understanding of it. In other words, as Caravaggio does in his paintings, we must be able to create specimen by abductively distancing from the single case, and be able to find back the single case using the specimen to understand.
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Acknowledgments
This article has been possible, thanks to the project “The administration of fear: using art to study psycho-social phenomena,” funded by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, 2016 International Network Programme.
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Tateo, L. (2019). Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy and the Art of Generalization. In: Højholt, C., Schraube, E. (eds) Subjectivity and Knowledge. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29977-4_8
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