Jacopo Carucci, called Pontormo after the Tuscan town he came from, was a leader of the Mannerist movement that dominated Italian painting in the 16th century.

Michelangelo once predicted that a 19- year-old Pontormo “will exalt this art to the heavens.” At a small show currently at the Morgan Library and Museum, Pontormo’s 1528 painting “Visitation” is being seen in America for the first time—on loan from a small church near Florence.  The New Yorker has called it “one of the damnedest great paintings of all time.”