Tomorrow is the feast day of the Visitation, so this week’s picture is a depiction of that theme by the great Florentine Mannerist painter, Jacopo Pontormo. The work was created some time between 1528 and 1530, to judge by its style and the bright, acid colours which the artist has employed – a hallmark of his work from this period. The picture adorns the altar of a side chapel in a small church called the Pieve di San Michele, in the town of Carmignano, close to Florence.
The picture shows the Virgin Mary, just after having received the Annunciation, paying a visit to her pregnant cousin Elisabeth. The fullest telling of the story is to be found in the Gospel according to St Luke. Zacharias and his wife Elisabeth “had no child, because that Elizabeth was barren”. But then the angel Gabriel appeared to Zacharias in a vision and told him that “thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John” – John the Baptist, as he would come to be known, “a child great in the sight of the Lord.” In the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, Gabriel was sent forth by God once more, this time to the city of Nazareth, where he announced to the Virgin Mary that she was to bear Jesus, the Son of God. On hearing the miraculous news, Mary went to Elisabeth, “and entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth. And it came to pass that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost: And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”
Pontormo depicted the subject in an extremely original way, intensifying both the physical and emotional intimacy of the encounter between Mary and Elizabeth by almost filling his composition with their monumental, embracing forms. Instead of setting the scene in the interior of Zacharias’s house, he places it on the threshold, which has the effect of casting the two bearers of miraculous babes as giants in a distinctly Florentine cityscape. In the middle ground, seated on a low wall, a pair of attenuated, watching figures seem tiny by comparison, mere human ants observing momentous events from a distance. The foreground group is completed by the two sisters accorded to the Virgin Mary by late medieval legend, Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome. They look on with calmly beatific, contemplative faces. Look closely and they seem in fact to look past Mary and Elizabeth and into the very eyes of the viewer, as if to urge meditation on a scene so heavily pregnant with sacred significance.
It is not known who commissioned Pontormo to paint this breathtakingly beautiful picture, but given its relatively small scale and extreme, affecting intimacy, it is likely that the work was originally designed to decorate the private oratory of a wealthy Florentine family. As Mary and Elisabeth look deep into each other’s eyes – with a subtle intensity of gaze that can only be appreciated when the picture is seen at close quarters – the charge of emotion that passes between them seems nearly palpable.
It is possible that there is a political dimension to this religious masterpiece. Pontormo painted it in the immediate aftermath of the Sack of Rome by the Lutheran troops of Emperor Charles V, an event which sent shockwaves across Italy and roused the citizens of Florence to turn against their Medici masters, expel them and declare the Florentine state a republic once more. At the height of the rebellion, the great artist Michelangelo, whose monumental forms and vivid palette had strongly influenced Pontormo, was living in the city. In his capacity as military engineer and architect, he busied himself with fortifying Florence against reprisals from a wounded papacy led by the Medici Pope Clement VII. Crisis was in the air.
The theme of the Visitation, in which the young Mary greets the wizened Elisabeth, had traditionally symbolised the passage from Old Testament to New. But in Florence in the late 1520s, it also acquired a subversive, Reformist significance. Many in the city believed that the Sack of Rome was just punishment meted out on a decadent Medici papacy, and felt that the time was ripe for the Church of Rome to heed the teachings of such as Erasmus and Luther and renew itself in a different form. Pontormo’s Visitation may have been intended to give visual expression to such beliefs. The outdoor setting, and the proximity of the principal figures to a heavily fortified wall, seemingly somewhere in Florence, appears to forge a link between the sacred subject matter and what was at stake, in the fight for the soul of the city. The fact that the picture is no longer to be found in Florence reinforces that possibility. Perhaps, when the Medici retook the city, as they did in August 1530, its owners fled to a nearby safe haven, taking this treasured possession with them.
Such speculation apart, what I love most about the picture is the way in which Pontormo has placed such emphasis on the swollen bellies of the two gravid women. As they reach out to embrace one another, those seedpod stomachs touch and the draperies that enfold them seem to crackle with an almost electrical energy. This was perhaps Pontormo’s way of suggesting the idea of a baby that leaps in the womb – and thus conveying the close, sacred relationship between the still unborn children, Christ the Saviour and John the Baptist.
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