The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John; Taddei Tondo

This marble sculpture by Michelangelo depicts some well-known characters from the Bible. On the right is Mary, mother of Jesus, who is shown as a child running into her arms. On the left is the infant figure of St John the Baptist with his baptismal bowl, the object that he’s often depicted with in artworks.

St John the Baptist is presenting a bird to the infant Jesus. The bird is widely believed to be a goldfinch, which represents Christ’s “passion” (the time of suffering before he was crucified), because a goldfinch is said to have removed a thorn from Christ’s crown when he was carrying the cross to the place where he would be killed. While it’s often thought that Christ’s reaching away from the bird and towards his mother expresses his fear, more recently other scholars have argued that Christ’s pose is playful as the goldfinch was a common pet in this period.

This marble is believed to have been carved from 1504 to 1505 during Michelangelo’s first period in Florence. It’s unfinished, probably because he left it when he travelled to Rome in early 1505 to work on Pope Julius II’s tomb. Giorgio Vasari, well-known for his Lives of the Artists published in 1550, suggested that Michelangelo did not complete some works out of creative frustration – an idea which has crystallised into the notion of the artist as troubled genius.

The sculpture was commissioned by the wealthy cloth merchant and connoisseur Taddeo Taddei. Despite its grand, ecclesiastical appearance, it was intended for a domestic setting and it remained in the merchant’s Florence home, the Casa Taddei, until the early 19th century.