The Conversion on the Way to Damascus (Conversione di San Paolo) is a work by Caravaggio, painted in 1601 for the Cerasi Chapel of the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, in Rome.

[1] The contract for the altarpiece with Carracci has not been preserved but it is generally assumed that the document had been signed somewhat earlier, and Caravaggio had to take into consideration the other artist's work and the overall iconographic programme of the chapel.

Caravaggio gained the Cerasi commission right after his celebrated works in the Contarelli Chapel had been finished, and Carracci was busy creating his great fresco cycle in the Palazzo Farnese.

The contract gave a free hand to the painter to choose the figures, persons and ornaments depicted in the way as he saw fit, "to the satisfaction however of his Lordship", and he was also obliged to submit preparatory studies before the execution of the paintings.

X-ray examination revealed another, almost complete version of the scene under the present painting, in which the saint is shown fallen to the ground, on the right of the canvas, his eyes open, his forehead lined, and his right hand raised.

For Saul this is a moment of intense religious ecstasy: he is lying on the ground, supine, eyes shut, with his legs spread and his arms raised upward as if embracing his vision.

The saint is a muscular young man, and his garment looks like a Renaissance version of a Roman soldier's attire: orange and green muscle cuirass, pteruges, tunic and boots.

Its characteristic elements were a rearing, panicked horse—although there is no mention of a horse in the Bible—with Saul lying on the ground, Jesus appearing in the sky and a retinue of soldiers reacting to the events.

This is how Taddeo Zuccari, one of the most renowned painters in Caravaggio's Rome, portrayed the scene on a large altarpiece in the Church of San Marcello al Corso around 1560.

"If we could turn Raphael's Saint Paul in such a way that his head would touch the lower frame and the length of his body would be directed more or less orthogonally inward, we would have a figure similar to that in Caravaggio's painting", observed Walter Friedlaender.

[13] Another possible source for the painting is a four-block woodcut attributed to Ugo da Carpi (c. 1515–20) whose central detail depicts Saul on the ground and a groom trying to calm his panicked horse and leading the animal away.

A more obvious, although less close precursor was the Conversion of Saint Paul by Michelangelo in the Pauline Chapel (1542–45) where a rearing horse and a soldier holding its bridle are conspicuous elements in the middle of the crowded scene.

Although some details and motifs may have been borrowed or inspired by these artworks, it is important to note that the pared-down composition and the intense spiritual drama of the Cerasi Conversion was a novelty without any direct iconographic precedent at the time.

"[16] Caravaggio's style of tenebrism, where forms in paintings emerge from a dark background with usually one source of stark light, created dramatic effects with its strong contrasts.

[19] Caravaggio was a successful and celebrated artist at the time of the Cerasi commission but the unusual style and composition of the painting gave rise to criticism early on.

The deviations from the traditional iconography all made the painting "bereft of action" in his eyes: the prominence of the horse instead of the biblical hero; the absence of Jesus; and the focusing upon an insignificant moment in the story after the fall of Saul instead of its real climax, the divine epiphany.

The art historian Jacob Burckhardt in his traveller's guide to painting in Italy (1855) instanced the Conversion on how "coarse" the compositions of Caravaggio were "when he did not care for expression", criticising that "the horse nearly fills the whole of the picture".

The most popular travel guides of the period, published by Karl Baedeker, in their very detailed descriptions of Santa Maria del Popolo simply omit the two canvases of Caravaggio and the Cerasi Chapel.

The English art critic, Roger Fry in his Transformations (1927) says that the Conversion is a combination of melodrama and photographic realism which is typical of the religious paintings of Caravaggio.

Roberto Longhi, who brought his name forward in the 1950s, wrote in 1952 that completely sweeping away the iconographical tradition of the time, Caravaggio offered for public view "what is perhaps the most revolutionary painting in the history of religious art.

He emphasized that both paintings of the Cerasi Chapel "were, in spite of their radically new and unaccustomed conceptions, perfectly fit objects for devotional meditation", because the scenes "are not remote spectacles, far separated from the spectator.