Die Heimsuchung

Two women embrace in front of a Roman arch. The pregnant Mary has come to see her older cousin Elizabeth, who is also expecting, and Elizabeth sinks slightly as she takes her hands. Ghirlandaio painted this in Florence in 1491 for a family chapel commissioned by Lorenzo Tornabuoni, a wealthy young Florentine close to the Medici. It was a busy, prosperous moment for the city and for Ghirlandaio's large workshop, which just a few years earlier had taken in a teenage apprentice named Michelangelo. Ghirlandaio had studied the new Flemish paintings arriving in Florence, and you can see it in the soft veil over Mary's head and the way light catches a ruby brooch at her breast, set there as a quiet sign of her son's Passion to come.