The Visitation

Marco d'Oggiono was a Milanese painter and close associate of Leonardo da Vinci, whose influence pervades all his surviving works. The Visitation — the meeting of the Virgin Mary with her cousin Elizabeth — was a subject d'Oggiono would have encountered in Leonardo's circle, where Marian iconography was deeply considered. D'Oggiono's works are important witnesses to the transmission of Leonardesque style in early sixteenth-century Lombardy.

The two figures embrace in a gently pyramidal composition, their expressions rendered with the soft, slightly sfumato modelling learned directly from Leonardo. D'Oggiono's palette is characteristically warm, and his handling of drapery shows the careful attention to descriptive detail typical of the Lombard school. The landscape background carries Leonardesque atmospheric recession.