Tondo Art

Woman with wax tablets and stylus, so called Sappho | Fresco | Pompeii, Naples, National Archaeological Museum

A tondo (plural "tondi" or "tondos") is a Renaissance🎨 term for a circular work of art, either a painting or a sculpture.

The word derives from the Italian rotondo, "round".

The term is usually not used in English for small round paintings, but only those over about 60 cm (two feet) in diameter, thus excluding many round portrait miniatures - for sculpture the threshold is rather lower.

Antonio Sicurezza (1905-1979) | Figurative painter

Antonio Sicurezza was an Italian painter🎨 representative for the contemporary figurative art of the Lazio region, Italy.

He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, winning a scholarship as a worthy competitor among the four faculties. He obtained the diploma in painting under the guidance of the masters Carlo Siviero, Vincenzo Volpe, Vincenzo Migliaro and Paolo Vetri.

The first contact with the territory of Formia was in 1933–1934, when he was called to paint the chapel of St. Anthony in the church of Maranola. Here he met Virginia Mastrogiovanni whom he married in 1934.

Leonardo da Vinci | Nativity paintings

Giorgio Vasari🎨, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists (1568) introduced his chapter on Leonardo with the following words:

"In the normal course of events many men and women are born with remarkable talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actio ns seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill".

Michelangelo Buonarroti | Tondo Doni, 1505-1506

Michelangelo painted this Holy Family for a Florentine merchant, Agnolo Doni, whose prestigious marriage to Maddalena Strozzi in 1504 took place in a period that was crucial for early 16th-century Florentine art.

The presence in the city of Leonardo🎨, Michelangelo🎨 and Raphael🎨 together, boosted the already lively Florentine art scene, which in the first decade of the century experienced a period of great cultural fervour.

Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) | Neoclassical painter

Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun was one of the most successful portraitists of 18th century France, gaining renowned in particular for her self-portraits and depictions of courtly women, Queen Marie Antoinette most famously.

Born in Paris as the eldest child of the portraitist Louis Vigée (1715-1767) and Jeanne Maissin, Vigée Le Brun was trained by her father from an early age.

She succeeded in gaining entrance to the Académie de Saint-Luc at the age of just nineteen, a remarkable accomplishment for a woman at the time.

Istvan Sàndorfi (1948-2007) | Hyper-Surrealist painter

István Sándorfi🎨 [1948-2007] also known as Étienne Sandorfi, was a naturalised French painter of Hungarian origin.

He received his formal art education at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and at École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris.

He mastered what art critics now term hyperrealism. But he did so with his very own blend of Surreal🎨 elements. Having been introduced to oil painting at the age of 12, Sandorfi🎨 dedicated much of his life to perfecting his painting techniques in order to achieve the photoreal and at the same time pull the carpet away under the viewer by letting part of a person dissappear in thin air.

Simone Cantarini (1612-1648) | Baroque painter

Simone Cantarini was born in Pesaro, in the Marches, a region which was a crossroads for artists from many parts of Italy.

Cantarini began his artistic training quite young, probably 1623-1625, in the studio of Giovanni Giacomo Pandolfi (?1570-1640?), a painter of religious works who combined the local naturalism with the mannerist style of the late sixteenth century.

After a brief trip to Venice, Cantarini moved to the shop of Claudio Ridolfi (?1570-1644), a student of Paolo Veronese🎨 (1528-1588).

Maxime Maufra (1861-1918) Impressionist painter

Maxime Maufra was a French🎨 landscape and marine painter, etcher and lithographer.

Maufra first began painting at 18.

He was encouraged to do so by two artists from Nantes such as the brothers Charles Leduc and Alfred Leduc and the landscape painter Charles Le Roux.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo | Il Quarto Stato / The Fourth Estate, 1901

The monumental painting Il Quarto Stato /The Fourth Estate by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907)🎨 portrays a group of workers on strike.

It symbolises the social protest at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the emergence of a new social class - the proletariat - which becomes aware of its rights within the new industrial society.

Achille Funi (1890-1972) | Futurist painter

Achille Funi was an Italian painter🎨 who painted in a neoclassical style.

Funi was born in Ferrara. He studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts from 1906-1910 and joined the Nuove Tendenze movement as a painter of Cubo-Futurist works in 1914.

Having enlisted in the Volunteer Cyclist Battalion and served in World War I, he became a champion of the "return to order".

Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo | Neo-Impressionist painter

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (July 28, 1868 - June 14, 1907) was an Italian Neo-Impressionist painter🎨. He was born and died in Volpedo, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy.

Pellizza was a pupil of Pio Sanquirico. He used a Divisionist technique🎨 in which a painting is created by juxtaposing small dots of paint according to specific color theory.

Cesare Ciani (1854-1925) | Post-Macchiaioli painter

Cesare Ciani was an Italian painter🎨 associated with the Post-Macchiaioli group.

A student of Giuseppe Ciaranfi at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1878, where he won a prize for painting, Cesare Ciani was also strongly influenced by the work of the Macchiaioli painter Giovanni Fattori🎨, with whom he also studied.

Fattori’s guidance is readily evident in Ciani’s landscapes, city scenes and portraits, confidently painted with broad, sketchy brushstrokes.

Olga Akasi, 1970 | Classical portraits painter

Olga Akasi / Ольга Акаси is an Ukrainian artist born in Kiev, Ukraine.

She studied painting at the Grekov Odessa Art school.

"Akasi’s characters have astonishing faces. They don’t look like faces of real people; they came from another world, very far from human being. They look like images that don’t exist in our world.

Artist materializes them, embodies them, makes viewer to peer at this different-being and not to recognize himself in it. Smiles of faces at her works are not mundane and not human; there is something different in human being, the mystery that unites mundane human world with non-material, spiritual image".

Joan Miró (1893-1983) | Surrealist painter / sculptor | Page 2

Joan Miró🎨 - Catalan painter who combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy.

His mature style evolved from the tension between his fanciful, poetic impulse and his vision of the harshness of modern life.

He worked extensively in lithography and produced numerous murals, tapestries, and sculptures for public spaces.

Henri Matisse | Art Quotes

• "What I am after, above all, is expression".
• "Ciò che sto cercando, soprattutto, è l'espressione".
• "I have worked to enrich my intelligence and meet my mind’s various needs, striving with all of my being for an understanding of the different interpretations of art given by the ancient and modern masters".
• "Ho lavorato per arricchire la mia intelligenza, per soddisfare le differenti esigenze del mio spirito, sforzando tutto il mio essere alla comprensione delle diverse interpretazioni dell'arte plastica date dagli antichi maestri e dai moderni".

Fede Galizia (1578-1630) | Baroque painter

Born in 1578 in Milan, Italy, Fede Galizia, like many female artists of her time, was the daughter of a painter (a miniaturist), who is assumed to have taught her his craft.

Little is known of her life, but her skill as a painter was first noted by Italian historian Giovanni P. Lomazzo when she was just 12 years old, and she was widely considered a prodigy.

Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) | Renaissance painter

Sofonisba Anguissola also known as Sophonisba Angussola or Sophonisba Anguisciola, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family.

Anguissola is significant to feminist art historians. Although there has never been a period in Western history in which women were completely absent in the visual arts, Anguissola's great success opened the way for larger numbers of women to pursue serious careers as artists; Lavinia Fontana expressed in a letter written in 1579 that she and another woman, Irene di Spilimbergo, had “set [their] heart[s] on learning how to paint” after seeing one of Anguissola’s portraits.

Michal Lukasiewicz, 1974 | Pop portrait painter

Michal Lukasiewicz was born in Pulawy, Poland and since 1995 lives and work in Antwerp, Belgium.

"My paintings are of the human form, the soft tenderness that it can transfer to the viewer; never the anger of the world but the peace and harmony that humans are capable of.

I have been influenced by living in Belgium and painters of the Benelux countries and I try to show the placid side of the subject using light, the reflection of light and the shadows to emphasise the subjects form and curves".

Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) | Genre Rococo Era painter

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was a French painter🎨 of portraits, genre scenes🎨 and history painting.

Greuze studied first at Lyon and afterward at the Royal Academy in Paris.

He first exhibited at the Salon of 1755 and won an immediate success with his moralizing genre painting of Father Reading the Bible to His Children (1755).

Pietro Perugino | The Certosa di Pavia Altarpiece, 1496-1500

Pietro Perugino🎨 (Italian Early Renaissance painter, ca.1445-1523) painted this altarpiece for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza.

It stood in the side chapel dedicated to the Archangel Michael in the Carthusian monastery (also known as a charterhouse or certosa) in Pavia, a town outside Milan.

The Duke was captured by invading French forces in 1499, and the altarpiece was completed in the early sixteenth century by two other painters: Fra Bartolommeo🎨 and Mariotto Albertinelli.