MICHELANGELO di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
The Holy Family with the infant St. John the Baptist (the Doni tondo)
c. 1503
Tempera on panel, Diameter 120 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Michelangelo probably realized this famous picture
about 1507, on the occasion of the birth of Agnolo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi's
first daughter. (Few years before Raffaello had painted the portraits of
Agnolo Doni and his wife, now conserved at Palatina Gallery in Florence).
Highly significant of the artist's style, the group with the Virgin, saint
Joseph and the Child shows the peculiar twisting of the limbs and the evidence
given to body's muscles, a pattern that clearly appears in michelangiolesque
sculpture. Brightness of colours, lighting effects, emphasize impressiveness
of the sacred figures. The nudes on the background, whose poses and gestures
are all connected to classical sculptures, symbolize pagan mankind, the
world before coming of Christ; on the right the little saint John indicates
the passage, through the baptism, from the pagan age to the christian age.
Michelangelo himself projected and maybe worked the frame, where, as well
as the Strozzi coat of arms (three half moon), are the Saviour's head in
the upper side and four head explained as prophets, sybils or angels.
Restored in 1985
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