The Visitation

Josse Lieferinxe's Visitation, painted around 1500 and now in the Department of Paintings of the Louvre, depicts the apocryphal meeting between the pregnant Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth — who is pregnant with John the Baptist — in the hill country of Judaea. The Visitation was among the Joyful Mysteries of the rosary and a subject of particular importance in Marian devotion, as it was the moment at which John the Baptist first responded to the presence of Christ by 'leaping in the womb,' signifying the Baptist's recognition of the Messiah before both were born. Lieferinxe, working in the Provençal tradition in Marseille and Avignon, treats this intimate meeting between two pregnant women with the warm naturalism and genuine human tenderness that characterize his best devotional work. The Louvre's panel is one of several Lieferinxe works in the collection forming a significant group of this important southern French painter's surviving production.

Lieferinxe renders the greeting between Mary and Elizabeth with the tender intimacy the subject demands, the two women's embrace at the compositional center conveying both the human warmth of the meeting and its theological significance. The Provençal landscape setting — warm hills, Mediterranean light — gives the scene its characteristic atmospheric quality.