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In its approach to Michelangelo's antique sources—the artist's unconscious attraction to them and the subsequent transmutation of the unacceptable latent content which drew him to them into an acceptable manifest one—Robert Liebert's paper is an important contribution to the methodology of art history. I should like to expand on this by commenting, occasionally in disagreement but never in disapproval, on his discussion of Michelangelo's Taddei tondo.
No part of the relief is what Michelangelo would have considered finished, in other words, smoothed and polished. Like many of his sculptures, it is still rough—the head of St. John, his left arm and hand and the bird he holds in it, and the right hand of Mary on John's shoulder are little more than blocked out—and shows the markings of the various kinds of chisels Michelangelo used as the work progressed. One of the problems posed by the work's unfinished state is the identity of the bird. In view of Christ's flight from it, it must be a symbol of the Passion; and the goldfinch, even in the absence of ornithological evidence, is the only bird that fits this role. Before the Taddei tondo the goldfinch was invariably held either by Christ himself, as in Carlo Crivelli at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, or by Mary, as in Bernardo Daddi in the collection of Bernard Berenson. The Taddei tondo is thus innovative not only in its fleeing Infant Jesus, but also in the motif which gives his flight occasion, St. John as the bearer of the goldfinch.