Michelangelo probably realized this famous picture about 1506, on the occasion of the birth of Agnolo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi's first daughter. (Few years before Raffaello had painted the portraits of Agnolo Doni and his wife, now conserved at Palatina Gallery in Florence).

Highly significant of the artist's style, the group with the Virgin, Saint Joseph and the Child shows the peculiar twisting of the limbs and the evidence given to body's muscles, a pattern that clearly appears in michelangiolesque sculpture. Brightness of colours, lighting effects, emphasize impressiveness of the sacred figures. The nudes on the background, whose poses and gestures are all connected to classical sculptures, symbolize pagan mankind, the world before coming of Christ; on the right the little saint John indicates the passage, through the baptism, from the pagan age to the christian age. Michelangelo himself projected and maybe worked the frame, where, as well as the Strozzi coat of arms (three half moon), are the Saviour's head in the upper side and four head explained as prophets, sybils or angels.

The Holy Family is in the foreground. The Virgin, a muscular young woman, is turning round with a complicated movement to take the Christ Child Joseph is handing to her over her shoulder. The meaning of this scene is both theologically and philosophically obscure, as is the significance of the naked young men in the background.

Restored in 1985