The Conversion of Saint Paul

Caravaggio painted The Conversion of Saint Paul around 1600 for the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, one of a pair of works alongside the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. The subject — Saul's blinding encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus — is rendered as a moment of overwhelming physical experience: the horse and groom occupy most of the composition, the fallen Saul pinned beneath the horse's raised hoof, his arms flung up in a gesture simultaneously of protection and surrender. Christ is absent from the composition — the divine encounter registered entirely through its physical effect on the human body. The dramatic foreshortening and the strange centrality of the horse were immediately controversial and influential.

The radical composition fills most of the canvas with the horse's hindquarters and the groom, while the blinded Paul lies foreshortened on the ground, bathed in a mysterious light that has no visible source—Caravaggio's most daring compositional invention.