The Price Just Doubled: Michelangelo, the Doni Tondo, and the Birth of the Artist as Rockstar – The Renaissance #234
About this episode
Cameron and Ray explore Michelangelo's tondos and his revolutionary approach to art during the Renaissance.
In this episode of The Renaissance Times, Cameron and Ray dive deep into Michelangelo’s three extraordinary marble and painted roundels — the tondos — created during his Florence years between 1501 and 1506. Beginning with the origins of the tondo format itself (those circular domestic artworks that started life as elaborately painted birth trays brought to mothers who’d survived childbirth), the hosts examine what makes Michelangelo’s approach so audaciously different from everyone else’s. In the Taddei Tondo, now housed in the Royal Academy of Arts in London, his signature *non finito* technique — deliberately leaving sections rough and unpolished — makes Baby Jesus emerge luminously from raw marble while John the Baptist lurks in the background in a pose that raises some eyebrows and a great deal of laughter. The Pitti Tondo, now in the Bargello in Florence, features a proud, regal Virgin Mary whose head breaks the boundary of the circle itself — a deliberate choice, since both works were designed to be viewed from below, above a doorway. Then comes the main event: the Doni Tondo, the only surviving panel painting by Michelangelo, which Ray declares —…
Topics covered
- Michelangelo
- Renaissance art
- tondos
- art techniques
- cangiante
- non finito
More episodes of The Renaissance Times
- Ghosting the Pope – The Renaissance #236
- The Warrior Pope and the Marble Dreamer – The Renaissance #235
- Renaissance #225 – Teenage Michelangelo: The Buff Baby Jesus and the Marble Prodigy (Michelangelo, part 3)
- Renaissance #224 – Privilege, Paint, and Patronage (Michelangelo, part 2)
- Renaissance #223 – Mickey The Angel (Michelangelo part 1)
- Renaissance #222 Thank Christ: The End of the First Crusade (The Crusades part 31)
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