La conversione di san Paolo

Parmigianino painted this around 1527, the year the world fell in on the city where he had been working. That May the unpaid troops of the Holy Roman Emperor stormed and looted Rome for weeks, and the young painter fled the sack and the wreck of the art world he had joined there. His subject is the moment Saul, the fierce persecutor of Christians, is struck to the ground by a blinding light on the road to Damascus and rises as the apostle Paul. He gives it a strange, elegant restlessness, the horse rearing and twisting across the whole picture while the fallen man throws up his arms, all in the elongated grace that a later age would name Mannerism. After Rome, Parmigianino carried that manner north to Bologna and then home to Parma.