The Visitation

Salviati's Visitation fresco of 1538 in San Giovanni Decollato — the Roman church serving the Florentine confraternity of that name — belongs to the celebrated decorative cycle that several leading Mannerist painters contributed to this church across the mid-sixteenth century. San Giovanni Decollato was the Florentine community's church in Rome, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist (here Decollato — beheaded), and its interior was decorated through the collective effort of Vasari's circle: Salviati, Jacopino del Conte, Battista Franco, and others each contributed frescoes of scenes from John's life. The Visitation — Mary visiting her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist — was an appropriate subject for the cycle. Salviati's fresco here is one of his most celebrated works, praised for the elegant grouping of the two women and the architectural setting.

Fresco on plaster, this work represents Salviati at his most ambitious in the monumental decorative mode. The technique required confident, large-scale execution in sections of wet plaster. Salviati deploys elegant architectural framing, figures with the elongated proportions and graceful poses of his mature Mannerism, and a cool, clear fresco palette that has preserved well over five centuries.