Doni Tondo - Influences

Influences

The composition is, most likely, partially influenced by the cartoon for Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne. Like this earlier cartoon, Michelangelo’s figures seem to be compacted into very little pictorial space and a similar bilaterally symmetrical triangular composition is employed. Michelangelo saw the drawing in 1501 while in Florence working on the David.

The Doni Tondo is also associated with Luca Signorelli’s Medici Madonna in the Uffizi. Michelangelo probably knew of the work and its ideas, and he wanted to incorporate those ideas into his own work. Signorelli’s "Madonna" similarly uses a tondo form, depicts nude male figures in the background, and displays the Virgin sitting directly on the earth.

Three aspects of the painting can be attributed to an antique sardonyx cameo and a 15th century relief from the circle of Donatello, available to Michelangelo in the Palazzo Medici: the circular form, the masculinity of Mary, and the positioning of the Christ Child. The Virgin’s right arm mirrors the arm of the satyr in the cameo, and the cameo also depicts an infant located on the shoulders of the satyr, a position similar to the Christ Child on Mary’s shoulders.

Additionally, some scholars suggest that Michelangelo was inspired by the famous Greco-Roman group of Laocoön and His Sons, excavated in 1506, which Michelangelo would have seen. The body positioning and muscular syle of the nude figures in the background of the Doni Tondo resemble the twisting contortions of the figures captured by the serpent in the Laocoön.

Furthermore, the inclusion of the five protruding heads in the paintings frame is often seen as referencing a similar motif found on Ghiberti's Porta del Paradiso, the bronze doors of the Florence baptistry which Michelangelo was known to greatly admire.