The sculpture, donated to the Casa Buonarroti by the publishing house Edizioni Cremonesi in 1989, bears the signature of its author on the base, in addition to the inscription "Michelangiolo," but is not dated. The work, un-known prior to its entry into Casa Buonarroti, testifies to the popularity of a subject that was repeated several times by the workshop of the Zocchi family. Here it is handled with a special grace and polish that derived on the one hand from the hagiography of illustrious men and on the other from the effort to rival the continual advances in the art of photography (note for example the meticulous reproduction of the various pieces of cloth that make up the boy's clothing). Here Cesare Zocchi, a sculptor of monuments that were erected in various parts of Italy around the turn of the century, represents a celebrated episode from Michelangelo 's adolescence, recounted in Vasari and Condivi's Lives and depicted in a fresco by Ottavio Vannini in the Sala di Giovanni da San Giovanni in Palazzo Pitti: the young artist, in the garden of San Marco, is carving the head of a faun in imitation of an ancient marble statue and attracts the attention of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The mask of a faun that appears in Zocchi's sculpture reproduces the one that used to be in the Galleria degli Uffizi and was thought at the time to be Michelangelo's earliest work. The mask, which Baldinucci had mentioned in the collections of the Uffizi and described as the work of Michelangelo, was definitively removed from the artist's catalogue by the studies of Hermann Grimm (1860). transferred to the Museo del Bargello, it vanished during the Second World War. The best known representation of this subject is the one made by Cesare Zocchi's cousin Emilio, who produced numerous replicas of it from the early 1860s onward. One of these, in marble, is in the Galleria Palatina of Palazzo Pitti.

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