La Visitation

Albertinelli made this in Florence in 1503, and he made it with a friend. His longtime partner was Fra Bartolomeo, a Dominican friar who had given up painting for a time under the preacher Savonarola, even helping burn worldly pictures on his famous bonfire. Surviving drawings show the two men worked out this design together before the friar's vows kept him inside his convent. What Albertinelli then painted is calm to the point of stillness, the pregnant Mary and her older cousin Elizabeth meeting and clasping hands under a grey stone arch, on a morning so clear it seems to hold its breath. He set the arch on pillars and slipped the date, 1503, into their carved ornament. His own signature only surfaced when the panel was cleaned in 1995.