Nearly 500 Renaissance religious paintings, mainly by Italian artists, show the bird, including da Vinci's Madonna Litta (1490–1491), Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch (1506) and Piero della Francesca's Nativity (1470–1475)[12][lower-alpha 1] In Medieval Christianity, the goldfinch's association with health symbolises the Redemption, and its habit of feeding on the seeds of spiky thistles, together with its red face, presaged the crucifixion of Jesus, where the bird supposedly became splattered with blood while attempting to remove the crown of thorns.[2][14] Many of these devotional paintings were created in the middle of the fourteenth century while the Black Death pandemic gripped Europe.[12]