Conversion of Saint Paul

The record's location field is not a museum

Most entries in this collection name a public gallery. This one names the Odescalchi Balbi Collection in Rome — a family holding. The catalogue reports it and this page reports the catalogue; how the picture came to be listed there is a question about provenance, and provenance is not in the record.

An attribute that has not been issued yet

Paul is identified by a sword and a book. Neither can appear in a conversion scene, because the episode the title names is the one that precedes his becoming Paul. The identification therefore rests entirely on the event: the road, the fall, the light. 4 titles in this collection name this conversion. A subject in which the attribute is absent is the clearest evidence of how the system actually works — the sign is not decoration attached to a figure, it is a label, and a label can be withheld when the story has not yet earned it.

What the record holds

The entry dates the canvas to 1600. The dimensions are 237 x 189 cm, a large upright. It is filed under Religion, Fantasy, and religious and mythological cultural heritage, with Baroque and Tenebrism as the styles and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown. Tenebrism — darkness with light admitted narrowly — is a method with an obvious application to a subject whose whole content is a light arriving from outside the frame.