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Only one of these unsatisfactory compositions survives. The attribution to Caravaggio has sometimes been questioned, but is now generally accepted. The dimensions of the panel are very close to those of the two oil paintings that the painter eventually completed for the Cerasi Chapel. Allowing for the painter’s use of an unfamiliar support, the style is convincing. The model for the angel reappears in at least one of Caravaggio’s later works.

It is not hard to see why Tiberio Cerasi rejected this first Conversion of St Paul. The composition is a clutter and a jumble. As the bearded Paul squirms on the ground, shielding his eyes from the dazzling celestial vision, his horse rears up and foams at the mouth. The saint’s aged retainer, clutching a shield decorated with a crescent moon and wearing an absurdly elaborate plumed helmet, resembles a baffled spear-carrier in a comic opera. Hearing a noise like a thunderclap, but seeing nothing, he brandishes his weapon at thin air. The young, bearded Christ descends from the heavens, reaching down to the stricken Paul with a gesture of grave compassion. He and the angel accompanying him lean awkwardly across a snapped branch of a laurel, like a pair of parachutists stuck in a tree. This cumbersome arrangement probably reflects some actual studio contrivance. A ladder and a length of rope may have been used to help the models assume their poses for this part of the mise-en-scène.

Once again, the artist’s memories of the popular religious art of Lombardy are much in evidence. The picture bears a strong resemblance to some of the more overcrowded scenes enacted by the busy mannequin figures in the chapels of the sacro monte tradition. The painting is more upright than the Contarelli Chapel canvases, yet Caravaggio has tried to squeeze almost as much dramatic action into the narrower compass allowed for by the cramped dimensions of the Cerasi Chapel. As a result, the forms and figures seem bizarrely compressed, with heaven and earth forced into a weird and unconvincing proximity.

During his early struggles with the Cerasi Chapel commission, Caravaggio was handicapped by an apparent inability to get away from the famous prototype of Michelangelo’s restless and turbulent Conversion of St Paul in the Pauline Chapel. The rearing horse and reeling saint, the figure of Christ descending from the heavens, arm outstretched – he borrowed and adapted all these elements from Michelangelo’s far larger and more densely populated painting, as if he were setting out to create a condensed version of the earlier work. It was only when Cerasi rejected the painting out of hand that Caravaggio reconsidered and found a diametrically different solution. For his second Conversion of St Paul, he went back to basics. He returned to oil on canvas and went back to the biblical source of the story, to find a new way of getting to its heart and bringing it to life.

The tale of Paul’s conversion is told in the Acts of the Apostles. The Roman citizen Saul of Tarsus, the future St Paul, was travelling to Damascus with letters of authority to persecute the Christians. A harsh and ruthless man, ‘breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord’, he was abruptly stopped in his tracks by a miracle:

And as he journeyed; he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest … And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink