Parish church of San Michele and San Francesco
According to tradition the primitive church of Carmignano named after San Michele was built around the year 1000 and was located under the Rocca. Since 1782 the current Pieve (country church) has found its final location in the ancient church of San Francesco (fourteenth century) of which there are traces on the left side outside the building. The church, damaged during the second world war, was restored immediately after the war eliminating various seventeenth-eighteenth century structures of a certain value. A five arches loggia supported by Tuscan style columns is against the gabled facade.
The ample nave of the church is covered by wooden trusses.
The most famous work inside is the Visitation by Pontormo, admirable testimony of the first Florentine Mannerism. The work was painted between 1528-30 commissioned by the Pinadori family and placed in the current location in 1740. The Pieve hosts also some detached frescos of the fifteenth century and interesting paintings of the fifteenth-seventeenth century.
The Visitation by Pontormo
The extreme formal elegance, the refined chromatism, the skilful compositional taste make this painting one of the highest masterpieces of Jacopo Carucci called the Pontormo, born in Pontorme (Empoli) in 1494. The Visitation depicts the meeting between Mary and Elizabeth that, wrapped in wide cloaks, appear as if raised on tiptoe. The wise chromatic alternations, the cangiantism and the effects of the chiaroscuro bring out the swollen drapery. The two imposing figures are "duplicated" by two other female figures, seen from the front, with an immobile and absent gaze, witnesses of the prodigious event.
On the left of the painting are depicted two other small figures, perhaps San Giuseppe and San Zaccaria. The Visitation is one of those rare works that constitute a unique unrepeatable in the career of an artist, and which are destined to leave a profound mark in the history of art as well as in the collective imagination.
Information
Address: Piazza Santi Francesco e Michele, 1, Carmignano
Ticket: free entrance
Phone: 055 8712046
GPX coordinates: 43.812311,11.0165019
