Scene from Hospital Life (Episodes from the Life of the Blessed Umiltà)

The building that now houses the Accademia was once the hospital of San Matteo, founded in 1385 by Lemmo Balducci, a Florentine moneychanger, and run by his guild, the Arte del Cambio, whose patron saint was Matthew. Around 1514 the guild had the young Pontormo paint a wall there. The long hall where the fresco hangs today, filled with Bartolini's plaster models, was the hospital's women's ward, so the picture has come back almost to where it started.

What he painted is a strip of hospital life in greens and greys, the colour coming from terra verde, a green earth pigment. Plain wooden beds line the room, and women in religious habits move between them tending the sick. Some scholars read the scene as episodes from the life of the Blessed Umiltà, a nun from Faenza who founded a convent in Florence and died there in 1310. Others see simply the ward itself, as it looked in Pontormo's day.

For a long time the fresco was given to Andrea del Sarto, until the historian Carlo Gamba proposed Pontormo, and today it counts among his earliest known works. It was cut from its wall in the 18th century, when the hospital was closed and the building turned over to the academy, and what survives is a fragment 91 centimetres high and 150 wide.