Doni Tondo

The Doni Tondo is Michelangelo’s only certain surviving panel painting, made for the Florentine merchant Agnolo Doni around 1506. In the circular format, the Virgin, Joseph, and the Christ Child are knit together in a spiraling, almost sculptural group, while nude youths recline in the background and the infant Baptist looks on. The work displays the monumental figure style that Michelangelo was then developing for the Sistine Ceiling, compressed here into an intimate domestic image.