Provenance

Nothing was known of the painting's history when it was offered at Christie's in 2006 and again in 2007 (see below), but our research has revealed a notably distinguished and important provenance for the panel. The Conversion of St. Paul is, judging on the basis of style, the same date as a painting by Garofalo of The Calling of St. Peter in the Borghese Gallery, Rome, and both paintings are the same size: larger and of a different format than are most of his narrative works of this type. Saints Peter and Paul, patrons of Rome and the Papacy, are typically paired in Italian art, and these two pictures must have been executed as pendants, the more so as they each portray the moment of the apostles' calling rather than the more frequently encountered scenes of their martyrdoms. In the Borghese inventory of 1693, there were listed two pictures of the Conversion of St. Paul attributed to Garofalo and a third, without attribution, that hung as a pendant to Garofalo's Calling of Saint Peter. The first two appear in subsequent inventories and remain in the collection today, but the third is absent from all Borghese records after 1693. We believe that the present work is likely to be that recorded in the Borghese collection in 1693. The painting is also likely to be the "large Conversion of Saul" by Garofalo acquired sixty or seventy years ago by Count Vittorio Cini for his well-known collection of Ferrarese paintings. The core of that collection, mainly small-scale fifteenth century Ferrarese panels, remains intact at the Cini Foundation in Venice. In his 1990 catalogue of that collection, however, Federico Zeri noted that because of its size, Garofalo's Conversion of Saul (which he does not discuss further or illustrate) was installed at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, separate from the rest of the Ferrarese panels. The pictures at Palazzo Grassi were eventually sold with the household furnishings and did not become part of the Cini Foundation collection. The Conversion of Saul was auctioned at Christie's, Milan, on 7 June 2006, in a sale that also included a number of pictures owned by the Cini heirs, among them a Crucifixion by Garofalo.
Count Cini would have acquired the painting between 1941 and 1950, and its location between 1693 and that time is not known. The Conversion of Paul thus has a gap in its provenance in the Nazi era, but having been offered at auctions in Milan in 2006 and New York in 2007, the painting seems not to be subject to any Nazi-era claim.