La conversión de San Pablo

Bruegel painted the conversion of Saul in 1567, and he does something odd with it. The event that made Paul, the flash of light that knocks him off his horse on the road to Damascus, is buried in the middle distance, small, half lost in a crowd of soldiers and horsemen winding up a steep Alpine pass. The eye lands first on the pikemen and cavalry in the foreground, who have nothing to do with the miracle. That same year the Duke of Alba marched a Spanish army of about 10,000 men over the Alps into the Netherlands to crush the Dutch revolt, and some viewers have wanted to read Bruegel's mountain column as that army. Most scholars don't accept the political reading. The pine-covered pass itself he seems to have taken from an older print by Lucas van Leyden.