Destined to furnish a nuptial bedroom, together with its pendant conserved in the monumental apartments in Palazzo Pitti, the holy water stoup reproduces the miraculous image of the SS. Annunziata, whom grand duke Cosimo III was particularly devoted to.
It was made at the beginning of the eighteenth century with gilded bronze and hard stones. It clearly exemplifies the taste of the workshop during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its great magnificence and accuracy of details.
The two busts of the Angel and the Virgin were made with chalcedony, lapislazzuli and jaspers carved separately and then fixed together with joints and glue, to obtain a complete image.
The precious manufacturing is enhanced by the gilded bronze parts of the halo and festoons, whose hard stone fruits were made by the so-called “fruit makers”, a special category of artisans of the workshop specialized in the carving of fruits, inserted into bronze festoons and wreaths as very common decorative elements during the Baroque era.