Tondo

About Tondo

Tondo, from the Italian rotondo, round, names a circular picture or carved relief. Greek vase painters fitted scenes into the round medallion inside drinking cups, and Romans displayed portrait busts on circular shields. In Florence the form flourished from the mid-15th century, when round panels of the Virgin and Child hung in homes, possibly linked to the painted birth trays given to new mothers.

Florentine artists turned the circle into a compositional challenge. Sandro Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat (c. 1483) bends its figures to the curve of the frame; Michelangelo's Doni Tondo (c. 1507) twists the Holy Family into a spiral; Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola (c. 1513–14) folds mother and child into the round. Andrea della Robbia's glazed terracotta roundels of swaddled infants mark the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres recut The Turkish Bath (1862) into a circle. Look for figures bent to fit the edge.