[4] In the mid-17th century,[3] the court of Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany gather to watch a play.

The Bishop auctions off the Child's fluid with many suspecting he is being tortured to produce holy tears and blood which sell at high prices.

Fearful to be without his powers they begin to gently strip his relics and eventually viciously dismember him hoping that his body will bring them good fortune.

[6] Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, however, noted that he "watched it to the end out of a sense of duty, not with pleasure or any hope of edification", while also describing the action as "lushly and rather beautifully filmed (by Sacha Vierny)".

In 2002, film director Andrew Repasky McElhinney selected two rare motion pictures, Isle of Forgotten Sins (directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, 1943) and The Baby of Macon, to have their belated Philadelphia premieres (in archival 35MM prints) for a "fantasy double feature" film series at the Prince Music Theater.

In the program notes for the screening, McElhinney wrote: "I have been insatiably drawn to termite and white-elephant art my entire movie-going life.

...white-elephant movies exist outside the bounds of rational criticism as immense and spectacular monuments to their director’s monstrous genius, ego and hubris.

Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Macon is such an animal, a multi-level Rocky Horror Picture Show set during a 1659 performance of a fifteenth century morality play, in which our perceptions of spectatorship, identity and construction are unsympathetically challenged and the fourth wall between “real” and “make-believe” continually assaulted.

The beauty of the ravishing cinematography, deluxe production design, and a script that suggests the movie is merely “a play with music,” are abrasively juxtaposed with graphic depictions of unspeakably cruel atrocities.