A notary's copy of the contract between Caravaggio and Cerasi.
The two lateral paintings of the Cerasi Chapel were commissioned in September 1600 by Monsignor Tiberio Cerasi, Treasurer-General to Pope Clement VIII who purchased the chapel from the Augustinian friars on 8 July 1600 and entrusted Carlo Maderno to rebuild the small edifice in Baroque style.[1] The contract for the altarpiece with Carracci has not been preserved but it is generally assumed that the document had been signed somewhat earlier, and Caravaggio had to take into consideration the other artist's work and the overall iconographic programme of the chapel.[2]
Although much has been said about the supposed rivalry between the painters, there is no historical evidence about any serious tensions. Both were successful and sought-after artists in Rome. Caravaggio gained the Cerasi commission right after his celebrated works in the Contarelli Chapel had been finished, and Carracci was busy creating his great fresco cycle in the Palazzo Farnese. In these circumstances there was little reason for them to regard each other as business rivals, states Denis Mahon.[3]
The contract signed on 24 September 1600 stipulates that "the distinguished painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio" will paint two large cypress panels, ten palms high and eight palms wide, representing the conversion of Saint Paul and the martyrdom of Saint Peter within eight months for the price of 400 scudi. The contract gave a free hand to the painter to choose the figures, persons and ornaments depicted in the way as he saw fit, "to the satisfaction however of his Lordship", and he was also obliged to submit preparatory studies before the execution of the paintings. Caravaggio received 50 scudi as advance payment from the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani with the rest earmarked to be paid on completion. The dimensions specified for the panels are virtually the same as the size of the existing canvasses.[4]
When Tiberio Cerasi died on 3 May 1601 Caravaggio was still working on the paintings as attested by an avviso dated 5 May mentioned that the chapel was being decorated by the hand of the "famosissimo Pittore", Michelangelo da Caravaggio. A second avviso dated 2 June proves that Caravaggio was still at work on the paintings a month later. He completed them sometime before 10 November when he received the final instalment from the heirs of Tiberio Cerasi, the Fathers of the Ospedale della Consolazione.[5] The total compensation for the paintings was reduced to 300 scudi for unknown reasons.[6]
The paintings were finally installed in the chapel on 1 May 1605 by the woodworker Bartolomeo who received four scudi and fifty baiocchi from the Ospedale for his work.[7]
The Odescalchi Balbi version of the painting
The first version
Giovanni Baglione in his 1642 biography about Caravaggio reports that the first versions of both paintings were rejected:
"The panels at first had been painted in a different style, but because they did not please the patron, Cardinal Sannesio took them; in their place he painted the two oil paintings that can be seen there today, since he did not use any other medium. And - so to speak - Fortune and Fame carried him along."[8]
This report is the only historical source for the well-known story. Although the biography was written decades after the events, its veracity is generally accepted. Baglione provided no further explanation about the reasons and circumstances of the rejection but modern scholarship has put forward several theories and conjectures. The first versions of the paintings were obviously acquired by Giacomo Sannesio, secretary of the Sacra Consulta and an avid collector of art. The first Conversion of Saint Paul ended up in the Odescalchi Balbi Collection. It is a much brighter and more Mannerist canvas, with an angel-sustained Jesus reaching down towards a blinded Paul.
X-ray examination revealed another, almost complete version of the scene under the present painting, in which the saint is shown fallen to the ground, on the right of the canvas, his eyes open, his forehead lined, and his right hand raised.[9]
Description
The conversion of Paul from persecutor to apostle is a well-known biblical story. According to the New Testament, Saul of Tarsus was a zealous Pharisee, who intensely persecuted the followers of Jesus, even participating in the stoning of Stephen. He was on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus to arrest the Christians of the city.
As he went he drew near Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?" He said, “Who are You, Lord?” The Lord said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”[10]
Saul is almost embracing his vision
The painting depicts this moment recounted in the Acts of the Apostles, except Caravaggio has Saul falling off a horse (which is not mentioned in the story) on the road to Damascus, seeing a blinding light and hearing the voice of Jesus. For Saul this is a moment of intense religious ecstasy: he is lying on the ground, supine, eyes shut, with his legs spread and his arms raised upward as if embracing his vision. The saint is a muscular young man, and his garment looks like a Renaissance version of a Roman soldier's attire: orange and green muscle cuirass, pteruges, tunic and boots. His plumed helmet fell off his head and his sword is lying by his side. The red cape almost looks like a blanket under his body. The horse is passing over him led by an old groom, who points his finger at the ground. He had calmed down the animal, and now prevents it treading upon Saul. The huge steed has a mottled brown and cream coat; it is still foaming at the mouth, and its hoof is hanging in the air.
The scene is lit by a strong light but the three figures are engulfed by an almost impenetrable darkness. A few faint rays on the right evoke Jesus' epiphany but these are not the real source of the lighting, and the groom remains seemingly oblivious to the presence of the divine. Because the skewbald horse is unsaddled, it is suggested that the scene takes place in a stable instead of an open landscape.[11]
This painting has helped form the myth of Paul being on a horse although the text does not mention a horse at all. Rather in Acts 9:8 it says that afterwards "Saul got up from the ground and opened his eyes, but could not see a thing. So they took him by the hand and led him into Damascus."
Style
Iconography
Taddeo Zuccari's Conversion of Saint Paul in the Church of San Marcello al Corso
Well-established iconographic tradition stipulated how the Conversion of Paul should be depicted in Renaissance and Baroque art. Its characteristic elements were a rearing, panicked horse—although there is no mention of a horse in the Bible—with Saul lying on the ground, Jesus appearing in the sky and a retinue of soldiers reacting to the events. This is how Taddeo Zuccari, one of the most renowned painters in Caravaggio's Rome, portrayed the scene on a large altarpiece in the Church of San Marcello al Corso around 1560. The figure of Paul in the Cerasi Conversion was derived from a model by Raphael via Zuccari.[12] Raphael's version was part of his Raphael Cartoons, a series of tapestries created for the Sistine Chapel in 1515–16.
"If we could turn Raphael's Saint Paul in such a way that his head would touch the lower frame and the length of his body would be directed more or less orthogonally inward, we would have a figure similar to that in Caravaggio's painting", observed Walter Friedlaender. He also suggested that the inspiration for the horse was Albrecht Dürer's most famous print, The Large Horse (1505), whose main subject has the same bulky, powerful hindquarters and the rest of its body is seen from a similar oblique angle.[13]
Another possible source for the painting is a four-block woodcut attributed to Ugo da Carpi (c. 1515–20) whose central detail depicts Saul on the ground and a groom trying to calm his panicked horse and leading the animal away.[14] This is the only known example among the antecedents which represents exactly the same moment as Caravaggio's painting. A more obvious, although less close precursor was the Conversion of Saint Paul by Michelangelo in the Pauline Chapel (1542–45) where a rearing horse and a soldier holding its bridle are conspicuous elements in the middle of the crowded scene. A painting that Caravaggio must have known was a very unusual Conversion which Moretto da Brescia painted for the Mint of Milan in 1540–41. This scene consists only two figures: Saul and his horse, and the horse strangely dominates the painting.[15] Moretto was probably inspired by a similar Conversion attributed to Parmigianino (1527).
Although some details and motifs may have been borrowed or inspired by these artworks, it is important to note that the pared-down composition and the intense spiritual drama of the Cerasi Conversion was a novelty without any direct iconographic precedent at the time. It represented a break with the tradition that even Caravaggio's own previous version more or less followed.
Tenebrism
Tenebrism creates strong contrasts between lighted and dark areas of the painting
Most of Caravaggio's paintings after 1600 depicted religious subjects, and were placed in churches. According to Denis Mahon, the two paintings in the Cerasi Chapel form "a closely-knit group of sufficiently clear character" with The Inspiration of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel and The Entombment of Christ in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. He called these four works "the middle group" and stated that they belong to Caravaggio's mature period. Comparing the two paintings in the Cerasi Chapel, Mahon saw the Conversion of Saint Paul "much more animated than its companion". This is conveyed solely by the ingenious use of the light because Caravaggio eschewed any but the slightest movements. This way he rendered "the scene unclear, mysterious and therefore curiously mouvementé."[16]
Caravaggio's style of tenebrism, where forms in paintings emerge from a dark background with usually one source of stark light, created dramatic effects with its strong contrasts. This lighting was evoking spiritual drama in the Conversion of Saint Paul.[17] The brighter areas are juxtaposed with "heavy dark patches, especially deep beneath the horse's belly and extending into impenetrable darkness that lies outside and beyond the circular grouping of the three figures". The usual landscape background was dismissed entirely and replaced with an intense concentration on the three figures who compose the scene.[18] The strong light and the enveloping darkness makes this focus even more intense.
The unusual placement of the characters also served to convey the intensity of the moment. Although Saul gets the most light, the attention is given to him in a strange way. Lying on the ground, he is much smaller than the horse, which is also at the center of the painting. Paul's body is foreshortened, and is not facing the viewer, and yet his presence is the most powerful because of his body is pushing into the viewer's space. The position of the horse and especially the front leg, which is hanging in the air, creates even more visual tension. The first compositional draft revealed by the X-ray examination was a more traditional composition with a visible source of divine radiance coming from the left.[19]
Reception
Giovanni Pietro Bellori
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."[20]
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.[21]
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".[22]
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.[23] 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."[24]
Roberto Longhi
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."[25]
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."[26]
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.[27] The poem was published in the Poetry magazine in 1958 under the title In Santa Maria del Popolo ('The Conversion of St. Paul').[28] 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."[29]
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known mononymously as Caravaggio, was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of his life, he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily until his death. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.
Annibale Carracci was an Italian painter and instructor, active in Bologna and later in Rome. Along with his brother and cousin, Annibale was one of the progenitors, if not founders of a leading strand of the Baroque style, borrowing from styles from both north and south of their native city, and aspiring for a return to classical monumentality, but adding a more vital dynamism. Painters working under Annibale at the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese would be highly influential in Roman painting for decades.
Amor Vincit Omnia in Latin, known in English by a variety of names including Amor Victorious, Victorious Cupid, Love Triumphant, Love Victorious, or Earthly Love is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio.
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter is a work by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, painted in 1601 for the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. Across the chapel is a second Caravaggio work depicting the Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus (1601). On the altar between the two is the Assumption of the Virgin Mary by Annibale Carracci.
Caravaggio created one of his most admired altarpieces, The Entombment of Christ, in 1603–1604 for the second chapel on the right in Santa Maria in Vallicella, a church built for the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri. A copy of the painting is now in the chapel, and the original is in the Vatican Pinacoteca. The painting has been copied by artists as diverse as Rubens, Fragonard, Géricault and Cézanne.
The Loves of the Gods is a monumental fresco cycle, completed by the Bolognese artist Annibale Carracci and his studio, in the Farnese Gallery which is located in the west wing of the Palazzo Farnese, now the French Embassy, in Rome. The frescoes were greatly admired at the time, and were later considered to reflect a significant change in painting style away from sixteenth century Mannerism in anticipation of the development of Baroque and Classicism in Rome during the seventeenth century.
The Denial of Saint Peter(La Negazione di Pietro) is a painting finished around 1610 by the Italian painter Caravaggio. It depicts Peter denying Jesus after Jesus was arrested. The painting is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The Conversion of Saint Paul, by the Italian painter Caravaggio, is housed in the Odescalchi Balbi Collection of Rome. It is one of at least two paintings by Caravaggio of the same subject, the Conversion of Paul. Another is The Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus, in the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo.
Bacchus is an oil painting by Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) commissioned by Cardinal Del Monte. The painting shows a youthful Bacchus reclining in classical fashion with grapes and vine leaves in his hair, fingering the drawstring of his loosely draped robe. On a stone table in front of him is a bowl of fruit and a large carafe of red wine. He holds out a shallow goblet of the same wine, inviting the viewer to join him. The painting is currently held in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is a painting of the subject of the same name. It is one of the most famous paintings by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, c. 1601-1602. There are two autograph versions of Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, an ecclesiastical "Trieste" version for Girolamo Mattei which is now in a private collection and a secular "Potsdam" version for Vincenzo Giustiniani that later entered the Royal Collection of Prussia, survived the Second World War unscathed, and can now be admired in the Palais at Sanssouci, Potsdam.
John the Baptist was the subject of at least eight paintings by the Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610).
The Cerasi Chapel or Chapel of the Assumption is one of the side chapels in the left transept of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. It contains significant paintings by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci, two of the most important masters of Italian Baroque art, dating from 1600 to 1601.
Giovanni Pietro Bellori, also known as Giovan Pietro Bellori or Gian Pietro Bellori, was an Italian art theorist, painter and antiquarian, who is best known for his work Lives of the Artists, considered the seventeenth-century equivalent to Vasari's Vite. His Vite de' Pittori, Scultori et Architetti Moderni, published in 1672, was influential in consolidating and promoting the theoretical case for classical idealism in art. As an art historical biographer, he favoured classicising artists rather than Baroque artists to the extent of omitting some of the key artistic figures of 17th-century art altogether.
Events from the year 1601 in art.
The Conversion of Saul is a fresco painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti. It is housed in the Pauline Chapel, Vatican Palace, in Vatican City. This piece depicts the moment that Saul is converted to Christianity while on the road to Damascus.
The Conversion of Paul the Apostle is an event in the life of Paul the Apostle.
The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects or Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni is a series of artist biographies written by Gian Pietro Bellori (1613–96), whom Julius von Schlosser called "the most important historiographer of art not only of Rome, but all Italy, even of Europe, in the seventeenth century". It is one of the foundational texts of the history and criticism of European art.
The Assumption of the Virgin by Annibale Carracci is the altarpiece of the famous Cerasi Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. The large panel painting was created in 1600–1601. The artwork is somewhat overshadowed by the two more famous paintings of Caravaggio on the side walls of the chapel: The Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Both painters were important in the development of Baroque art but the contrast is striking: Carracci's Virgin glows with even light and radiates harmony, while the paintings of Caravaggio are dramatically lit and foreshortened.
Tiberio Cerasi was a Roman jurist and Treasurer-General to Pope Clement VIII. He is mainly known for building the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome and commissioning Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci to create three famous paintings there.
The paintings in the Contarelli Chapel form a group of three large-format canvases painted by Caravaggio between 1599 and 1602, initially commissioned by Cardinal Matteo Contarelli for the Church of St. Louis of the French in Rome, and eventually honored after his death by his executors. The intervention of Cardinal Del Monte, Caravaggio's patron, was decisive in obtaining this contract, which was the most significant of the painter's young career when he was not yet 30. The works evoke three major stages in the life of the apostle Saint Matthew: his calling by Jesus Christ, his writing of the Gospel guided by an angel, and his martyrdom. They are still preserved in the Church of St. Louis of the French.
↑ Walter F. Friedlaender: Caravaggio Studies, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 302-303
↑ Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Two "Avvisi", Caravaggio, and Giulio Mancini, in: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Spring 1993), pp. 22, 25.
↑ Stefania Macioce: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: fonti e documenti 1532–1724, Ugo Bozzi, 2003, doc. 116., p. 106
↑ Giovanni Baglione: The Life of Michelagnolo da Caravaggio, in Giulio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione, Giovanni Pietro Bellori: Lives of Caravaggio, Pallas Athene, 2005
↑ Helen Langdon about Caravaggio, Carracci, Maderno. La cappella Cerasi in Santa Maria del Popolo. Edited by Maria Grazia Bernardini in The Burlington Magazine 144 (1190), January 2002, p. 300
↑ Acts of the Apostles 9:3-5, Modern English Version
↑ For example by Ann Sutherland Harris: Seventeenth-century Art and Architecture, Laurence King Publishing, London, 2005, p. 43; or Francesca Marini: Caravaggio and Europe, Random House Inc, 2006, p. 112
↑ Lorenzo Pericolo: Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting, Harvey Miller Publishers, 2011, p. 257
↑ Walter Friedlaender: Caravaggio Studies, Schocken Books, 1969, p. 21 and pp. 7-8
↑ David Rosand and Michelangelo Muraro: Titian and the Venetian woodcut, Washington, 1976, cat. 13
↑ Catherine R. Puglisi: Caravaggio, Phaidon Press, 2000, p. 221
↑ Sloan, Grietje. “The Transformation of Religious Conversion from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Petrarch and Caravaggio.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, vol. 15, no. 1, 1988, p. 145.
↑ Maria Grazia Bernardini: Caravaggio, Carracci, Maderno. La cappella Cerasi in Santa Maria del Popolo, 2001, Silvana, p. 126
↑ Giovanni Pietro Bellori: Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni, Rome, Mascardi, 1672, p. 207
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