The Visitation

Around 1519 this picture was put on public view in Rome. Mary, newly pregnant, has come to see her older cousin Elizabeth, who is expecting the child who will become John the Baptist, and the two women embrace at the centre. Two companions stand at the left, and at the upper right Elizabeth's husband Zacharias comes down a flight of steps. Sebastiano signed it on a stone block at the lower right. Two years later, in 1521, the painting probably went to France as a gift from the Republic of Venice, the painter's home city, to King Francis I, and so it entered the French royal collection. It was painted on wood. At some later date the paint was transferred onto canvas, a delicate operation used to rescue pictures whose panels had warped or split.