Conversion on the Way to Damascus

Caravaggio painted this in 1601 for the Cerasi Chapel here in Santa Maria del Popolo, under a contract that gave him just eight months to deliver two large canvases. The story is the conversion of Saul, the fierce persecutor of Christians who, on the road to Damascus, is struck blind by a light from heaven and rises as the apostle Paul. Most painters filled that scene with sky and angels. Caravaggio does the opposite. He crowds the whole frame with a huge horse and gives us Saul flat on his back on the ground, arms flung up into a light we cannot see the source of. An old groom steadies the animal, barely aware anything holy is happening. There is no lightning and no chorus, only that one hard beam falling out of the dark. An early account says the chapel's patron rejected Caravaggio's first version, and this is the one he painted to replace it.