Another is The Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus, in the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo.
The painting, together with a Crucifixion of Saint Peter, was commissioned by Monsignor (later Cardinal) Tiberio Cerasi, Treasurer-General to Pope Clement VIII, in September 1600.
According to Caravaggio's early biographer Giovanni Baglione, both paintings were rejected by Cerasi, and replaced by the second versions which hang in the chapel today.
Caravaggio biographer Helen Langdon describes the style of Conversion as "an odd blend of Raphael and clumsy rustic realism," but notes how the composition, with its jagged shapes and irrational light which picks out details for their dramatic impact, creates "a sense of crisis and dislocation [in which] Christ disrupts the mundane world."
Several modern commentators (including John Gash[1] and Peter Robb[2]) have questioned whether the rejection of the first versions of Caravaggio's two paintings was quite so straightforward as the record makes it seem, and speculate that Cardinal Sannessio may have seized the opportunity of Cerasi's unexpected death on 3 May 1601 to, in effect, seize the paintings.