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Caravaggio’s own revelation, on rereading these words, may have been as sudden. The story is essentially a parable played out between the twin poles of his own art – a tale of light and darkness. Lost in the shadows of evil and ignorance, a vicious man is suddenly bathed by the light of God and his soul is washed clean. In the moment of his ecstatic vision the divine light enters him, invades and permeates his whole being. Filled with this inner illumination, the light of truth and faith, he becomes blind to the mundane world about him. There are striking parallels with the story of Matthew called by Christ as Caravaggio had imagined it in the Contarelli Chapel. But this time the metaphor of illumination, which the painter had brought to the bare text of Matthew’s gospel, is there in the biblical account itself: ‘there shined about him a light from heaven’. In that phrase, he found his key to understanding the nature of Paul’s conversion. Turning his back on the tumult and drama conventionally associated with Paul’s conversion, Caravaggio created a picture of unprecedented calm. Gone are the creakingly theatrical figures of Christ and the angel, replaced by a spectral radiance that is the light of God. There is no noise, no clamour, no comedy of misapprehension here – just simple ignorance contrasted with miraculous divine illumination, an irresistible tide of light that floods the saint and changes him forever.

Paul’s retainer stands quietly to one side, lost in his thoughts and half lost in the shadows. A hard-faced balding man with a furrowed brow, he tends with calm solicitude to the horse from which his master has fallen. Below, almost beneath the animal’s hooves, the figure of Paul lies on his back with his eyes closed like a man dreaming of his lover. His arms are open wide, embracing the light that envelops him, filling him with truth and wisdom and humanity. He is considerably younger than the wizened, bearded Paul of the rejected version. This Paul is very much the tough Roman soldier described in the Acts of the Apostles – a hard-bodied athlete with a granite jaw who has suddenly been melted by the love of God. His sword lies by his side, resting in folds of red drapery as if to symbolize the rivers of Christian blood that he had meant to shed when he set out for Damascus.

In the moment of Paul’s ecstasy, the world is brought to a standstill. A physical journey has turned into a spiritual odyssey. Caravaggio’s decision to purge the story of visible narrative was brave and unorthodox, but expressive. Bellori, missing the point with perfect eloquence, described the picture as ‘the Conversion of St Paul, in which the history is completely without action’. On the contrary: the action has been completely internalized, so that we see or sense it unfolding within Paul’s soul. He is being moulded by the light that models his figure with its soft and gentle rays. In the chiaroscuro that plays along the length of his outstretched left arm, in the shafts woven through the tips of his fingers, in the gleams reflected in the dull sheen of his fingernails, light itself becomes palpable – something he feels, accepts, draws into the depths of his body.

This is a painting to be understood intuitively, instinctively. It is not an intellectual picture, nor one that shows any interest in beauty as conventionally understood. It is designed to speak not to the rich or theologically learned but to the poor – to roughshod peasants and sunburned labourers, ordinary people who had made the long pilgrimage south to Rome and found themselves, at last, inside the city walls. The composition is dominated by the solid, heavy form of the patiently standing horse, lifting a heavy hoof so as not to tread on the prone body of its master. The animal is no thoroughbred, but a stocky piebald beast of burden. Caravaggio paints the weight and density of its powerful flank. He paints the animal’s patience and loyalty. He even conjures up a feeling of the heat that emanates from its slow, heavy body – in rural parts, in the little