The Holy Family, pausing on their escape from King Herod’s massacre, is a moment from the life of Christ favored since the Renaissance for its ability to communicate the tender care with which Christian faith must be nurtured, and to inspire devotion through the figure of the infant Christ. Everything is focused on nourishing the Christ Child. The Virgin acts as his throne, while Joseph offers him a pomegranate. The angel at left presents more fruits that seem just to have been harvested by the three putti in the tree behind. A donkey takes a protective position behind the group and even the little dog at the Virgin’s feet seems solicitous of the child’s well-being. Here devotion to the faith is represented in instantly accessible terms, as care and attention to a child. In the last decade of her life, Roldán specialized in created modelled and painted groups of exquisite refinement—"jewels of sculpture," she called them—for private devotion at the royal court in Madrid.