Tondo taddei di michelangelo biography

By RA Collections team

Published on 1 April 2017

The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John, known as the Taddei Tondo, is the only marble sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti in a UK collection.

The infant figure of St John the Baptist stands to the left with his baptismal bowl, the "attribute" with which he's often recognised in art history.

He presents a bird to the infant Christ, who momentarily turns towards his mother, symbolically anticipating his future destiny; the bird is widely believed to be a goldfinch, which represents the Christ’s Passion, the time of suffering before his Crucifixion, because a goldfinch is said to have removed a thorn from Christ’s crown when he was carrying the cross.

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 th