It was commissioned in 1515 and was signed and dated by the artist in 1517 in the inscription on the pedestal; it is now in the Uffizi in Florence.

The Virgin is standing on a pedestal which includes harpies sculpted in relief, from which the painting takes its name.

At least, Vasari (and presumably his Florentine contemporaries) thought they were harpies; some modern art historians think that locusts are represented, in a reference to the Book of Revelation.

Compared to the stillness of earlier paintings of similar groups, here the "dynamism of the High Renaissance was inimical to the static quality of 15th-century art", so that "a composition of fundamentally classical purity is animated by a nervous energy in the figures to produce an unsettling impression of variety.

[3] The harpies, figures from pagan mythology (or locusts), here represent temptation and sin, which the Virgin has conquered and stands upon.