Tondo (art)
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A tondo is a Renaissance term for a circular work of art. The word derives from the Italian rotondo, "round."
Since Greek antiquity artists have created tondi, particularly in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The revival of the tondo composition since the sixteenth century has been less usual. In Ford Madox Brown's painting The Last of England, the ship's wire railing curving round the figures helps enclose the composition within its tondo shape.
The background scene is consolidated or omitted, and to a large extent, unimportant. While the background is visible in tondo paintings, in tondo relief carvings the background is not seen. Andrea Della Robbia and other members of his family created glazed terracotta tondi that were often framed in a wreath of fruit and leaves and which were intended for immuring in a stuccoed wall. In Brunelleschi's Hospital of the Innocents, Florence, 1421-24, Andrea Della Robbia provided glazed terracotta babes in swaddling clothes in tondos with plain blue backgrounds to be set in the spandrels of the arches.
The portrait of the Greek poet Menander is an example of tondo. The painting of the inside of the broad low winecup called a kylix also lent itself to circular enframed compositions. In the sixteenth century the painterly style of istoriato decoration for maiolica wares was applied to large circular dishes: see also charger.
The tondo has also been used as a design element in architecture since the Renaissance; it may serve centered in the gable-end of a pediment or under the round-headed arch that was revived in the fifteenth century.
Michelandelo employed the cicular tondo for several compositions, including The Holy Family with the infant St. John the Baptist, the Doni Tondo at the Uffizi[1].
The infrequently-encountered synonym rondo (source:artlex.com), much more usually refers to a musical form.
[edit] Notes
[edit] Further reading
- Roberta J. M. Olson, The Florentine Tondo, Oxford 2000.
- Moritz Hauptmann, Der Tondo: Ursprung, Bedeutung und Geschichte des italienischen Rundbildes in Relief und Malerei, Frankfurt am Main 1936.
