The last time I saw them? Ten years ago. I remember being moved by the paintings. CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER made it into a poem I wrote about a homeless man who lived in his car on the farm for a few weeks when I was a boy. Grimy, bearded, crucified, it seemed to me, by the world. Something about a fire. All his possessions gone. He left his Bible behind. Christ’s words in red. But I was too young the last time I was in Rome. I hadn’t lost enough to feel gratitude for what I still have — my vision, whatever it is about me that makes me want to collaborate with the world rather than just live in it (though to live in it is more than enough). I remember paying to light the paintings up, and how ravenously I looked. I liked that you had to pay, and how there was a limit to how long you could look until you had to pay more. But I don’t remember much more than that. So I’ve come back.
I intend to visit these paintings by Caravaggio every day I’m here. From the apartment I’m renting, it’s perhaps a two-minute walk across the Piazza del Popolo. The paintings, CRUCIFIXION OF ST. PETER and CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL, are in Santa Maria del Popolo. More specifically, they are in the Cerasi Chapel, CRUCIFIXION on the left, CONVERSION on the right. Facing one another. I’ll go in the mornings, before it gets too hot. The church opens at 9:30. I will look at one painting each morning — today CRUCIFIXION, tomorrow CONVERSION - only as long as the light lasts. If someone has already paid, I will borrow what remains of their light. If I find the Chapel dark, I’ll illuminate it.
I have no real model for this work, except, perhaps, for T.J. Clark’s THE SIGHT OF DEATH, in which he studies two landscape paintings by Poussin. Perhaps there is more to see in them than there is to see here. But the very simplicity of the paintings may itself be generative. I am not an art critic. I know nothing about painting. I like Caravaggio because I like Caravaggio. I don’t know much about his life aside from the fact that he was, as Whitman wrote, “one of the roughs.” Killed a man. Was killed himself in a bar fight. When I think of his life, I see a strange kind of tool, one with a brush on one end and a blade on the other. A painter of beauty and of darkness. But I don’t know where he fits into art history, nor do I much care. It’s a relief not to know too much.
Nor am I very interested in probing the Biblical stories he dramatizes here via the paintings. I hardly know anything about Peter’s career post-Christ. I know his bones are — supposedly — in the basilica across the River. That he was a fisherman once. That he requested he be crucified upside-down so as not to suggest he was equivalent to Christ. That he was the apostle Jesus chose to build his church upon, as if upon rock. As for Paul, I know only from the painting that he used to be a man named Saul — a soldier, a very good one at that - and that on the road to Damascus he was struck down and reborn. I know he would go on to write some very beautiful letters that I would hear snippets of when I was a boy in church. But I don’t know when he lived.
I’m admitting my ignorance here because I don’t want to pretend to have any deeper intentions for this project than to catalogue a few moments of careful attention I’ve paid two paintings.
July 4th
I walk in. I don’t remember this place, though I know I was here before. It’s a beautiful church, of course it is, but the fact that I’m here for a specific purpose makes me impatient. I walk past incredible art in order to see art I’ve decided is more incredible. But I’m not alone in this. There’s a reason that you only have to pay to light up the Caravaggios.
They’re in a narrow chapel to the left of the altar. What you see first, the painting in the center, by somebody else, is so unremarkable that I actually don’t remember, writing up these notes in my room now, what it’s of. One could imagine the Caravaggios split between two chapels — CRUCIFIXION on the front-facing wall in its own chapel to the left, CONVERSION on the front-facing wall in its own chapel to the right, but then they wouldn’t speak to one another (though this idea of them as being in relationship with one another is something I’m not entirely sure of). And I’ve already read an essay that suggests that it is precisely the awkwardness of their positioning on either wall that draws us as viewers into the charged space between the paintings, something like that invisible but powerful zone of attraction between two magnets (though the paintings could as easily repel one another as attract one another). The metaphor of the magnets is mine. He was simply saying that it seems awkward and cramped and therefor must be intentional. He also writes a lot about the window and the light, but the fact that you have to pay to artificially light the paintings up in the middle of the bright Roman summer morning suggests perhaps that they were never meant to be seen as well as we see them.
This morning, this first morning, the light is off. There are people mingling about. Maybe they’ve already seen them, or maybe they haven’t thought to pay. I slip two one-euro coins into a slot (I remember there being a separate slot for each painting last time) and suddenly they’re illuminated. I’m like a father who, finding his daughter reading in the near-dark, says something about how she’ll ruin her eyes as he turns the overhead light on. And the eyes she’s been ruining? She rolls them.
I cheat. I look awhile at both paintings, out of simple excitement. But today, this first day, I’ve decided to focus on CONVERSION.
I won’t describe the paintings here, only touch upon what stands out to me. Today, the first thing I note are the veins in the leg of Saul’s assistant. Though, wait, is he still Saul, or is he Paul now, or is he some nonentity in between? I’ll call him Saul/Paul from now on. If he’s Saul, he’s not the same Saul who was riding on the horse to Damascus. And if he’s Paul, he’s wearing Saul’s clothes. So. Saul/Paul.
The veins in the calves of this man, leading the horse out of the way, suggest that it takes blood to stand on earth. They remind me of the calves of a man I saw in Hawaii. I remember thinking very clearly, “That man is going to die.” Not soon or anything. Just that he absolutely was going to die one day. It was his legs that betrayed him. He was one of those white men who shave their legs for some reason and wear baggy shorts and his calves were very pale and he was definitely going to die.
This man, the man leading the horse way, hasn’t been struck down yet — the man he serves has. Perhaps this man with the calves will never be struck down, until the day he dies. Saul/Paul has been struck down before death. There is much talk about being reborn; there is less talk about how, to be reborn, one also has to die twice. I think he’s not quite Saul and not quite Paul because he has died but is yet to get up.
All the trappings of his old life have fallen away. The feathered helmet seems almost to have flown off his head. His sword, too, is fallen. Unarmed, unhelmeted, he lies exposed beneath the lifted hoof of the horse he was just on and is now under. He is at once vulnerable and invulnerable — we both fear for him and know, already, his future. The story doesn’t say, “A man named Saul was riding to Damascus one day to kill some Christians when, struck by the sudden presence of God, he fell off his horse and was trampled to death by his horse.” But in the timeless moment of the painting, he is forever under the hoof, raised like a nearer, crueler god. To really read the painting, without filling in the rest of the story, is to fear for one who himself seems fearless. Not because he is courageous, but because he is not himself.
His eyes are closed not in expectation of any earthly blow. Myriad are the reasons we close our eyes. Because we’re tired. Because a horse is about to step on our face. Because we’re dead. But none of those reasons quite apply here. His eyes aren’t closed because of the light that seems to radiate down from the upper right corner of the painting. Nor are they closed because of the raised hoof. He’s not asleep. He’s not dead. One might guess that he’s praying. Hence the raised arms. I don’t think so. I think he has closed his eyes because there is nothing to see here.
The horse is awkwardly shortened — there is somehow too much horse for the frame, and yet Caravaggio wanted to get the whole horse in. The horse itself seems both aware and not — ridden before by Saul for a definite purpose, this is a moment of great change for the horse, as well. From being ridden to being led. A whole story could be written about this horse. I’m reminded of an awful novel written from the perspective of Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveler. I never actually read it. Maybe it isn’t awful. Maybe the only way to understand war is through the eyes of a warhorse.
Like Saul/Paul, the horse is naked now, too, its back bare of its rider. It must be led away. It must know that what is underneath it now is not mere world but one who has fallen. Its master has been mastered. Suddenly, servant and horse serve no purpose. For them, too, everything has changed.
Christ claimed to have overcome the world. Saul has been overcome. He must begin anew, not on his horse’s back, but on his own. How often in life do we find ourselves sprawled beneath that which we believed ourselves masters of?
Santa Maria del Popolo one of my favorite churches in Rome🔥