Caravaggio. Félix Witting

had already tried to revolutionise and renew the fundamental laws of painting, outdid this monument to his recently-discovered style in an even more magnificent way in the paintings he carried out for the Cerasi for their chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. On the right-hand wall of the chapel to the left of the nave, directly next to the choir,[58] is The Conversion of Saint Paul, and on the left-hand wall The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. J. Burckhardt’s judgement of the works, in which his dislike of Caravaggio is clearly expressed, remains exaggerated and restricts access to the understanding of an important moment in the Baroque.[59] His reproach concerning the horse, from which the apostle has slid following his vision, which almost completely fills the picture on its own, seems unjustified given the mastery of the application of the paint in the forms and colours. On the contrary, it is the contrast between the struck-down animal and the divine messenger who is standing in the background which renders the impact even more significant. From a purely artistic point of view, this pushing of enormous corporeal masses into the foreground marks the point at which painting left its previous tendencies behind.