Mark Bosco, S.J. Flannery O’Connor as Roman Catholic Baroque Artist: It goes without saying that Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic faith brought a distinctive voice and style to her art. Given her singularly Catholic literary vision, O’Connor’s brand of religious orthodoxy is often discussed in light of Thomas Aquinas or by 20th century interpreters of Aquinas, such as Jacques Maritain. Indeed, O’Connor has jokingly referred to herself as a hillbilly Thomist and admits that she “cut her teeth” on Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism. Critics and scholars continue to describe her as a “Thirteenth Century Lady,” thoroughly invested in the mysticism and medieval synthesis of pre-modern Catholicism. Yet there is another way to connect O’Connor to an alternative century of Catholic intellectual and artistic flourishing. An unconventional approach to understanding O’Connor and her artistry is in terms of the Roman Catholic Baroque of the seventeenth century. As both an imaginative and a religious response to culture, Baroque art offered a theological vision that was as accessible to everyone as it was excessive in its sensory overload. Catholic Baroque communicated religious insight in expressive and emotional ways, rendered in theatrical or revelatory moments in painting and sculpture. I propose that by contextualizing the flourishing of seventeenth century Catholic counter-reformation artistic strategies, we can fruitfully compare O’Connor’s experience of being a Catholic artist in the Protestant South. It can be argued that, in this framework, O’Connor’s southern realism, her love of the grotesque, and her often violent epiphanies, have much in common with the Baroque world of Caravaggio, Bernini, and Rubens. |