The Florentine tondo

"Roberta Olson explores an important phenomenon in Italian Renaissance art: the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century flowering of the tondo (or circular) form in painting and sculpture, which represented the Renaissance ideal of the perfect form. The Florentine Tondo fills a major gap in Florentine artistic and cultural history, collating documentary, textual, and artistic material with new evidence and discoveries about patronage, location, function, and iconography; it also charts the patterns of tondi production and establishes their meaning within a cultural context. In explaining the iconography of specific tondi, Professor Olson illuminates a further facet of Renaissance culture; many of her analyses provide answers to previously puzzling issues."--BOOK JACKET.