The Visitation

This is early Tintoretto, painted around 1549 when he was barely 30 and still building a name in Venice. It shows the moment from Luke's gospel when Mary, newly pregnant, climbs a hill to visit her older cousin Elizabeth, herself expecting a child late in life. The two women meet in a doorway while their husbands look on. It began as an altarpiece in the church of San Pietro Martire in Bologna and hung there until French troops swept through Italy under Napoleon and religious houses were emptied, when it passed to the city's picture gallery. A generation later the young Bolognese painters of the Carracci family studied this canvas closely as they learned their trade.