Saint John the Evangelist and the Archangel Michael

Jacopo Carucci is remembered as Pontormo, after the little town of Pontorme outside Empoli where he was born. Around 1519, still in his mid-twenties, he painted these two tall panels for the parish church there, a homecoming commission for a painter already working in Florence for far grander patrons. On the left an aged Saint John the Evangelist pauses, pen ready, as if waiting for the words to come. On the right the Archangel Michael stands in armour that bares his legs, pressing down the devil, whom Pontormo shows not as a monster but as a small winged child, given away only by the barbs on its wings. The panels still hang in the church they were made for.