La Visitación

The Capponi family commissioned this panel around 1490 for their chapel in the church of Santo Spirito in Florence. At its centre the pregnant Virgin Mary meets her older cousin Elizabeth, who is carrying the future John the Baptist, while two saints sit reading in the foreground. The one on the right is Saint Anthony, and perched on his nose is a pair of spectacles, painted with real care. Eyeglasses had only spread through Italy over the previous century or so, and Vasari, writing his lives of the artists decades later, singled the detail out as especially fine. Piero also tucked small stories into the distance behind them, an Annunciation on a far wall, a Nativity, and shepherds out in the fields to the left.