At that time Mary made up her mind and went without delay into the hill country, to a town in Judah. She entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb. Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed in a loud voice: “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb! But why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill His promises to her!” (Luke 1, 39–45) / So, leaving the house of her parents and forgetting her people, the most chaste spouses Mary and Joseph set out on the road and headed toward the house of Zechariah in the mountains of Judea, which was twenty-seven leagues from Nazareth. (Mystical City of God, Book II, 201)

The Visitation is the moment when Virgin Mary, pregnant with Jesus, visits her cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth is pregnant with Saint John the Baptist and this serves as confirmation of the sign given by the Archangel Gabriel during the Annunciation, that her elderly cousin would have a child. The main source for this passage is the Gospel of Saint Luke.

In iconography, the Visitation is depicted as the encounter, often shown as an embrace or a gesture of reverence between the two women. Although the Gospel passage indicates that the two women had different ages, in many representations, such as in this case, this is overlooked for idealization purposes. The presence of Joseph and Zechariah is a detail that comes from apocryphal sources and pious traditions, since it is not mentioned in the Gospel of Luke.