Thom Gunn and Caravaggio's Conversion of St.

Paul
Author(s): Jeffrey Meyers
Source: Style , Vol. 44, No. 4, Narrative Representation in Art, Cognition, and Social
Interaction (Winter 2010), pp. 586-590
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.44.4.586

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 Critical Notes

Jeffrey Meyers
Royal Society of Literature

Thom Gunn and Caravaggio’s

Conversion of St. Paul

Caravaggio (1571-1610) combined the violent characteristics of Thom Gunn’s

poetical heroes: Ben Jonson, who killed a man, and Christopher Marlowe, a
homosexual who was stabbed to death. Wounded in a sword fight in Naples,
Caravaggio fled the city and died, near Rome, on the beach at Porto Ercole. His
corpse was exhumed on the 400th anniversary of his death in an attempt to confirm
his elusive identity. He was always a mysterious and controversial figure—artist,
invalid, brawler, murderer, convict and exile—and his exalted art contrasted with
his wretched life and early death.
In the fall of 1953, soon after taking his degree at Cambridge University, Gunn
won a small travel grant and spent some time in Rome. He was tremendously
impressed by seeing Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St. Paul (1601) and described
it in “In Santa Maria del Popolo,” the first poem in his third book, My Sad Captains
(1961). The church, just inside the old northern gate of the city, between the Tiber
and the Pincio Gardens, was erected in the 11th century on the site of Nero’s tomb.
A veritable museum of art, it had been renovated by Bernini and contains works
by Raphael and Carracci as well as—in a narrow chapel to the right of the main
altar—two paintings by Caravaggio: The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion
of St. Peter. Georgina Masson’s Companion Guide to Rome noted that the church
was “badly lit and in parts badly cared for; but with a little patience one can usually
discover the light switches” (215). Wanting to see it in natural light, Gunn patiently
waited an hour until the setting autumnal sun illuminated the shadowy and half-
hidden Conversion.
The mystical epiphany and harrowing conversion of Saul, the fanatical enemy
of Christianity, and his transformation on the road to Damascus into the equally
fanatical St. Paul, is one of the most famous incidents in religious history. Chapter

586 Style: Volume 44, No. 4, Winter 2010

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Thom Gunn and Cravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul 587

9 of the Acts of the Apostles relates how Saul was simultaneously thrust into
darkness and granted spiritual insight: “as he journeyed, he came near Damascus:
and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the
earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? . .
. And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me do? . . . And
Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but
they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.” On the Street called
Straight, Saul’s vision was miraculously restored by Ananias: “And immediately
there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forth with, and
arose, and was baptized.”
By describing Caravaggio’s Conversion closely, by interpreting it
iconographically, by looking at it with the same attention and intensity as the
poet, we can see what he saw in Santa Maria del Popolo and make that ideal
correspondence between his visual image while writing and the one in our minds
while reading. In his depiction of this almost cinematic moment, Caravaggio painted
the curtained background and earthen floor in a somber dark brown. The massive
tan-and-white horse, with dark-and-white mane and prominent rump, dominates the
upper three-quarters of the crowded composition. Its head is lowered and held with
an embossed bridle by an old, bent, balding, wrinkled-browed, red-nosed groom,
whose bulging-veined legs and bare feet appear between the powerful shanks of
the horse. Preoccupied with the animal, the groom ignores the spiritual drama.
The horse raises its thick, iron-shod right leg as if to trample the prostrate
saint, who lies on his back on a blood-red cloth. The rough-looking Saul, unshaven
and with his eyes closed, wears a red, leather-bound, armored tunic over a white
shirt with rolled- up sleeves. His plumed helmet and sword, symbols of his past
militant life, are abandoned at his side. Upside down and seen from above, his tense,
muscular body is foreshortened and his shaggy head touches the lower edge of the
picture. Unaware of what has suddenly blinded him, he extends his bare arms and
spread legs toward the middle of the painting. He is caught in the sudden process of
divine transformation, and his splayed fingers seem to be reaching out defensively
for succor and salvation. In Caravaggio’s typically dramatic chiaroscuro the light,
coming from the right and dispelling some of the shadows, shines on the groom’s
high forehead, the horse’s white flank and the new apostle’s supplicating arms. The
viewer in the chapel shares Paul’s unusual perspective by looking up at and over
the head of the stricken and supine saint.

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588 Jeffrey Meyers

Gilles Lambert writes that Caravaggio’s “interpretation was intensely

provocative. The horse occupies almost the entire space of the picture. A Prelate
of Santa Maria is said to have asked in exasperation:
‘Why have you put a horse in the middle, and Saint Paul on the ground?’
‘Because!’
‘Is the horse God?’
‘No, but he stands in God’s light.’ ”

Roberto Longhi believes “the two Santa Maria pictures testify to the full extent of
Caravaggio’s genius. . . . [He] has become a master of darkness, and what he lets
us perceive through it cannot diminish his tragic, virile pessimism” (66). Timothy
Wilson-Smith observes that “the drama is internalized within the mind of Saul. He
lies on the ground stunned, his eyes closed as if dazzled by the brightness of God’s
light that streams down the white part of the skewbald horse, but that the light is
heavenly is clear only to the believer, for Saul has no halo” (66).
The first three stanzas of Gunn’s strictly secular “In Santa Maria del Popolo”
focus on the painting; the last stanza describes the people—the “Popolo”—praying
in the church.1 In the opening stanza Gunn emphasizes, as the sun drops and the
picture emerges from the shadows of the recess (not the chapel), the artistic and
earthly rather than the divine light:
Waiting for when the sun an hour or less
Conveniently oblique makes visible
The painting on one wall of this recess
By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
I see how shadow in the painting brims
With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs,
Until the very subject is in doubt.

“Various limbs” is a witty comment on the complex interweaving of four equine

and eight human limbs, and “doubt”—a dominant theme of the poem--expresses
the poet’s rather than the painter’s attitude toward the divinely inspired conversion.
The next stanza puns on the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament and
in the pictorial account of the conversion. The “indifferent groom” tends the
unsaddled horse rather than the saint on the ground, who may have been thrown
off his mount. But Saul’s ruddy face is well lit, not hidden. Gunn sceptically calls
the revered conversion a “convulsion,” as if the possessed maniac has had some
sort of epileptic seizure, and questions the meaning of his outstretched, frightened
and prayerful arms:

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Thom Gunn and Cravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul 589

But evening gives the act, beneath the horse

And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,
Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,
Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.
O wily painter, limiting the scene
From a cacophony of dusty forms
To the one convulsion, what is it you mean
In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

The third stanza alludes to Ananias’ restoration of Paul’s sight, which coincides
with his formal baptism into the church. And Gunn describes an apocryphal account
of the artist’s death, in a fight over money with a male prostitute, which he corrects
in a note added to the Collected Poems: “I am not sure where I read this account
of Caravaggio’s death. I later found that it is not the accepted one” (93-94, 489).
No Ananias croons a mystery yet,
Casting the pain out under the name of sin.
The painter saw what was, an alternate
Candour and secrecy inside the skin.
He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent
Young whore in Venus’ clothes, those pudgy cheats,
Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,
For money, by one such picked off the streets.

In the last stanza the poet, changing perspective but hardly enlightened by the
religious experience, is moved by the art but unable to believe in the comforting
myth. The gullible old women praying in the dark interior of the church rest their
heads on tiny fists and tired arms, in striking contrast to the illuminated, open-arms
of the newborn saint. Yet, in Gunn’s view, Paul reaches out to embrace not faith
but the nothingness of Sartre, an early influence on his poetry:
I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel
To the dim interior of the church instead,
In which there kneel already several people,
Mostly old women: each head closeted
In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.
Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
­—For the large gesture of solitary man,
Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

The action of the poem progresses with visual images—“I see,” “I see,” “the
painter saw”—which provide a striking contrast to Saul’s blindness. And the poet’s
turning in the last stanza is set against Paul’s etymologically related conversion. The
poem also moves from darkness and light in the chapel and painting to dimness in
the church while subtly suggesting parallels between the biblical Saul’s encounter

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590 Jeffrey Meyers

with God and the modern poet’s encounter with the Baroque picture. Unlike Saul,
another hard case, Gunn does not accept religious belief. In this account of the poet’s
celebration of aesthetic pleasure, rejection of religious illusion and acceptance of
doubt, the solitary modern man reaches out both to embrace and resist nothingness.
It is no accident—in this work of sight and insight, mystery and revelation--that
the next poem in the book is suggestively called “The Annihilation of Nothing”
and begins with the devastating word “Nothing.”

Notes
Neil Powell, “Real Shadow: Gunn and Caravaggio,” and Stefania Michelucci,
1

“‘The Large Gesture of Solitary Man’: Thom Gunn and Caravaggio,” Agenda,
37:2-3 (1999), 57-63, 64-69, discuss the poem but say little about the meaning
and influence of the painting.

Works Cited
Gunn, Thom. “In Santa Maria del Popolo.” Collected Poems. NY: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1994.

Lambert, Gilles. Caravaggio. Köln: Taschen, 2000.

Masson, Georgina. Companion Guide to Rome. London: Fontana, 1965.

Wilson-Smith, Timothy. Caravaggio. London: Phaidon, 1996.

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