Standing in a niche in the Chigi Chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, it shows the Prophet Habakkuk with the angel of God.

At the time the two niches at the sides of the main altar were still empty while the other two on the left and right of the entrance were filled with the statues of Lorenzetto created after Raphael's design: Jonah and the Whale and Elijah.

A surviving drawing from the workshop of Bernini proves that the architect at first planned to move the two Raphaelesque statues to the empty niches by the altar but soon he changed his mind.

He created two new statues depicting the Prophet Daniel and Habakkuk, and these sculptures formed a larger composition facing each other diagonally across the space of the chapel.

Another reason why Bernini probably chose to picture this episode is that the Chigi Library contained the only known Septuagint text of the Book of Daniel from which the story was drawn, the Codex Chisianus 45.