Explore the Reception of this artwork, Conversion on the Way to Damascus.
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 first influential art critic who dismissed the painting was Giovanni Pietro Bellori. In 1672 he wrote in The lives of the modern painters, sculptors and architects about the Cerasi Chapel:
"Caravaggio executed the two lateral paintings, the Crucifixion of Saint Peter and the Conversion of Saint Paul; whose history is completely bereft of action."
This is a more scathing criticism than it sounds because Bellori claimed that "painting is nothing but the imitation of human action"; thus a painting completely without action was a non-painting for him. 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. Undoubtedly, the narrative momentum was disrupted by these decisions but Caravaggio has done this to extend the conventional confines of pictorial narration.Bellori stands at the head of a long line of hostile commentary. 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".Caravaggio's reputation reached its lowest point in the second half of the 19th century. 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 paintings are not mentioned in the fifteen editions published between 1867 and 1909.
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. "The original design of man and horse is not without merit, despite the triviality of observation and insistence on details for their illusive effect, but the whole design comes to pieces when St. Paul is thus wilfully pushed into the scene and the parts have no longer any significance in relation to the whole.", he argued. Even in 1953 Bernard Berenson, probably the greatest authority on Italian Renaissance painting in the first half of the 20th century, called the painting a charade:"Nothing more incongruous than the importance given to horse over rider, to dumb beast over saint. Surely more picaresque than holy."
Opinions changed again fundamentally in the middle of the 20th century when Caravaggio was recognized as one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art. 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. [...] Were it not for the fact that the painting was placed on a side wall, we might wonder how Caravaggio could have had it put on public exhibition without encountering severe criticism, or even an outright rejection."Another leading scholar at the time, Walter Friedlaender in his groundbreaking monography, Caravaggio Studies (1955) used the analysis of the Conversion of Saint Paul as an introduction to the art of Caravaggio. 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. They speak directly to him, on his own level. He can understand and share their experiences: the awakening of faith, and the martyrdom of faith."This appreciation found a literary expression in a poem by Thom Gunn, a young English poet who was highly regarded by British critics in the 1950s. Gunn spent a few months in Rome on a student fellowship in 1953 after graduating at Cambridge, and he was much impressed by the paintings of Caravaggio in the Cerasi Chapel. The poem was published in the Poetry magazine in 1958 under the title In Santa Maria del Popolo ('The Conversion of St. Paul'). It gives an entirely secular reading of the painting, devoid of anything sacred, interpreting it as "the defeat of a yearning for the Absolute which is inevitably denied to man [...], as a sort of defeated Faust."
Roger Fry Crucifixion of Saint Peter Rome Roberto Longhi Bernard Berenson Thom Gunn Cerasi Chapel right Walter Friedlaender Jacob Burckhardt Caravaggio Conversion of Saint Paul Santa Maria del Popolo by Karl Baedeker Giovanni Pietro Bellori