Italo Calvino

While reading through this article, I often found myself going back and rereading just because I had trouble fully understanding what Calvino was trying to convey to his readers. However I also found myself going back and rereading certain parts of this article again because I was intrigued at the way that Calvino explained certain arguments. I found myself thinking "Wow I have never thought about that in that light before" numerous times, which was enjoyable to me because I got to read about something I found to be very interesting and a somewhat abstract way of thinking. I found this article to be an informative piece on a different way of thinking about art and connecting it to our mental processes that happen when we not only see art but think about it.

Calvino began with a very religious approach to explaining the way that images come into our heads and how they form, saying that God sends them to us from the heavens when referring to Dante. This is an interesting approach to the idea, especially for someone that believes heavily in God. This also connects with the human imagination and Calvino again brings Dante in to examine his argument. It was interesting to read about how the human brain functions when doing something so simple such as reading a book or thinking about something that happened in the past. No matter what, images are continuously flowing in and out of our brains, creating scenes and pictures that may never exist. It is also fascinating to examine the idea of interpretation. Two people could read the exact same paragraph from a book yet two completely different images could form based on personal interpretation and ideas. This is an interesting relation to psychology and how the brain functions when doing things like creating an image.

It is interesting to think about the fact that people have completely different ways of interpreting something just based on how their brain sees fit. I found this article to be interesting in examining the inner thoughts and the ways that images flow into our conscious to create a full picture or a scene. That is how all art forms begin, just by thinking about something, seeing an image or vision and then expanding on that image or vision. Italo Calvino really expanded and examined the idea of personal interpretation and the idea that those personal interpretations could be applied in numerous situations.