The Conversion of Saint Paul

While the extant graphic oeuvre of Perino del Vaga is comparatively large, the corpus of his easel paintings is relatively small. This is, for the most part, due to his working practice. Throughout his life he was employed on important large-scale decorative schemes; first as a member of Raphael’s studio in the Vatican Logge, where he both assisted Giovanni da Udine and also executed ceiling frescoes after Raphael’s designs (the Story of Joshua and the Story of David, are generally accepted as Perino’s work). He would later work independently on commissions such as the interior of the Palazzo Baldassini, Rome (circa 1525), frescoes in the Pucci Chapel, in the church of Trinità dei Monti, Rome (circa 1525), interiors in the Doria Palace at Fassolo, Genoa (begun 1528), and Papal commissions from Paul III including the ceiling of the Sala Regia in the Vatican (1542) and the decoration of the papal suite at Castel Sant’Angelo (begun 1545). Interestingly, the latter includes a feigned gold tondo in the scheme of the Sala Paolina which takes as its subject the Conversion of Saint Paul and replicates the composition of the present painting almost exactly.

On a stylistic basis, The Conversion of Saint Paul has been dated to Perino’s Genoese period, between 1528 and 1538, when he was in the service of Andrea Doria. Saint Paul’s reclining pose and the distinctive curl of the hand pointing back at his face are an almost exact repetition of one of the titans in the lower right corner of Perino’s fresco The Fall of the Giants, executed in 1531 on the ceiling of one of the great halls on the piano nobile of the Doria Palace. Clear formal similarities can also be seen with an altarpiece painted in the early 1530s, the Nativity or Pala Baciadonne (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., inv. no. 1961.9.31), in which the same heavenly group of God the Father descending in golden clouds with his billowing red cloak and phalanx of putti can be found (fig. 1). In all three instances, as in many other examples of Perino’s work, the underlying influence is evidently Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, which the young Florentine had studied when he first arrived in Rome. The parallels between the muscular figure of Saint Paul in the present painting and Adam, and the gestures of God the Father with his Vatican counterpart, are unambiguous.

As Linda Wolk-Simon notes in her 2003 article (op. cit. p. 56), though the proposed date of The Conversion of Saint Paul and the suggestion that it was in the Doria collection in the nineteenth century both indicate that the work was executed for Andrea Doria, the subject matter is not one immediately connected to the Genoese Admiral-Prince. In 1535, however, Pope Paul III named Doria ‘Defender of the Faith’, and presented him with a ceremonial sword to mark the occasion. Wolk-Simon makes the argument that the prominence of the sword hilt at the lower edge in conjunction with the Pope’s patron saint is intended as a symbolic reflection of the papal honour and that the painting may have been commissioned to celebrate the event.