La Visitation

Perugino painted this little scene in Florence in the early 1470s, when he was young and still working in the orbit of Andrea del Verrocchio, the sculptor and painter whose busy workshop was also training a young Leonardo da Vinci. It shows the pregnant Mary greeting her older cousin Elizabeth, with Mary's mother Anne beside them. It was never meant to stand alone. It was part of a predella, the row of small panels along the base of a larger altarpiece that has since been lost. In the far corners Perugino added tiny figures, Francis of Assisi taking the stigmata on one side and John the Baptist, Florence's patron, on the other.