San Michele Arcangelo

The painter Jacopo Carucci was born in 1494 in Pontorme, then a village just outside Empoli in the lower Arno valley, and history remembers him by its name, Pontormo. His village church, San Michele Arcangelo, is first recorded in 1192, and it holds two tall panels he painted around 1519, when Florence's leading families were already giving him work.

One shows Saint John the Evangelist, the other the Archangel Michael, the church's patron saint. Each stands about 1.7 metres high. In 1737 they were set on the altar of the Crucifix, beside the church's venerated wooden crucifix.

The church has more to see. On the high altar is a gilded wooden tabernacle from 1576 by Girolamo Macchietti, a Florentine painter trained under Vasari, and there is an Immaculate Conception painted in 1589 by Cigoli, then a young Florentine artist. A short walk away, the house presented as Pontormo's birthplace displays facsimiles of his drawings for the two saints.