Only Until January 6…..

…can you see this wonderful painting at the Pierpont Morgan Gallery, where it is the centerpiece of this exhibition:

Pontormo: Miraculous Encounters

Otherwise you will have to travel to a small town about ten miles outside of Florence to see it again.

Pontormo painted this work in 1529-30 at a key transitional point in Western art, religion and politics. In Italy, an aesthetic reaction was setting in against the seemingly immutable balanced “classicism” that had been achieved in the Renaissance golden age. North of the Alps, the Protestant Reformation had erupted – but the first stirrings of the Counter-Reformation were also already at hand. And Pontormo painted this work while the doomed Republic of Florence was under a devastating siege by the Imperial army.

This Visitation offers a perspective entirely different from that of the art of Pontormo’s immediate predecessors. The figures are elongated and almost float in the air. The colors are startling. But, for me, what is most impressive are the faces of the Virgin and St Ann. The entire painting concentrates on the moving encounter of these two women as they silently gaze at each other’s countenance… We can sense here the beginnings of a rebirth of a more intense, almost ecstatic religious feeling.

For more information see the WEBSITE of the Pierpont Morgan Library