This tiny exhibition holds just five works, but it needs only one: The glowing Visitation altarpiece by the Italian Renaissance master Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1557), a pioneer of the stylized mode known as Mannerism. The painting depicts the moment when the Virgin Mary, expecting baby Jesus, embraces her elderly cousin Elizabeth, miraculously also pregnant with John the Baptist. The women, life-size and in profile, meet on the street of a Tuscan town, illuminated by a shaft of light from a lowering sky. They wear intricately draped robes, in lapidary turquoise, pink, mint and saffron. Gravid and heavy-limbed, they nonetheless move with the lightness and grace of dancers.
Behind them stand two female attendants, facing the viewer. So similar are they in appearance, age and dress to the main figures that they become doppelgangers, as if the Biblical characters simultaneously were reenacting their stories and communing directly with parishioners. Pried temporarily for restoration from a church in Carmignano, outside of Florence, the Visitation is a breathtaking masterpiece of color, composition and psychological intensity, enhanced by steep perspective and a pair of incongruously minute figures, ostensibly in the far distance.
Other works by Pontormo in the show include an elegant painted portrait of an aristocratic young man and a related drawing of an armed youth, both made in Florence at the same time as the Visitation, between 1528 and 1530, when the city was besieged by foreign armies—perhaps explaining the faint air of anxiety that perfumes both the secular and sacred imagery.