Following the great success of the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition, the National Galleries of Ancient Art announce that the Conversion of Saul - one of the peaks of Merisi's production, known as the Odescalchi Altarpiece - will remain extraordinarily exhibited in the halls of Palazzo Barberini until autumn.

From July 24 to September 30, 2025, the precious oil on panel by the Lombard Master will indeed be hosted in the Landscape Room on the noble floor of the museum, in dialogue with the high-definition copy of Caravaggio's version of the Conversion made for the Cerasi Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. To complete the exhibition dossier dedicated to the Odescalchi Altarpiece, the infrared reflectography carried out during the restoration of the work in 2006 will also be presented.

In 1600, the banker Tiberio Cerasi commissioned two paintings from Caravaggio for his family chapel. For reasons still unclear, the two works - including the Conversion of Saul - were never exhibited in the Chapel, and Merisi created two new versions, this time on canvas, which can still be admired today in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, owned by the Edifici di Culto Fund. The original altarpiece, instead, after various changes of ownership, became part of the collection of Nicoletta Odescalchi, to whom it still belongs.

The extraordinary juxtaposition of the two versions of the Conversion of Saul allows for an in-depth exploration of Merisi's creative process and the profound transformations in his pictorial conception, between dramatic pathos and mystical introspection. The first version - the so-called Odescalchi Altarpiece - stands out for its compositional energy, the dynamism of the scene populated by a "crowd" of characters, and the use of particularly vivid and brilliant colors. Different and subsequent is the version now preserved in Santa Maria del Popolo - presented here in a reproduction of very high resolution - which was painted on canvas and in a more collected, silent, and intimate form.