The picture in which Paul has no attributes

Paul is identified by a sword and a book, and in a conversion subject neither of them is available. The episode the title names comes before he is Paul at all: the fall on the road to Damascus, the light, the voice. Painters therefore identify him by the event rather than by the objects, and the event has its own fixed furniture — a road, a fallen man, and by long convention a horse the tradition itself never mentions. 4 titles in this collection name this conversion, by 4 different artists.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the canvas to 1682 and gives the Museo del Prado in Madrid as its location. The dimensions are 125 x 169 cm, wider than tall — the format a fall takes, since a figure on the ground needs horizontal room. It is filed under Religion, Fantasy, and religious and mythological cultural heritage, with Baroque as the style and Spanish as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

Why Fantasy is filed against it

90 entries in this collection carry that tag, and it is doing consistent work in all of them: a subject index that records what a picture contains needs a heading for figures the world does not supply. A voice from the sky has to be given a body before it can be painted, and once it has one, the catalogue has to file it somewhere.