The Conversion of Saint Paul

In this more crowded telling, Christ himself swoops down with an angel to seize the fallen Saul, the figures piled and gesturing under a dark sky. It is Caravaggio's first version of the conversion for the Cerasi Chapel - rejected, the sources say, by the patron - and he replaced it with the starker, near-empty composition that is also in this collection. Seen together, the two reveal the painter editing himself toward radical simplicity, throwing out heavenly machinery in favor of one man, one horse, and an invisible blaze of light.