Ask the Scholar

On a simple stone ledge before a distant landscape, the Virgin, wearing a multi-colored scarf around her head and a pearl-encrusted jewel around her neck, kneels in prayer before the Christ Child, who lies naked on the ground surrounded by rays of divine light. Christ's cousin John the Baptist reverently looks on from the left while Saint Joseph peers over the ledge at the right. The painting is a “tondo,” or circular painting, a common domestic decoration in Renaissance Italy. Tondi were often commissioned to commemorate special events such as a marriage or the birth of a child. This example was painted around 1500 by the so-called Master of the Greenville Tondo, an anonymous artist whom art historians have named after one of his finest works, a tondo now in the collection of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. This painter’s works are recognizable by the distinctive sweet, graceful figures and tranquil landscapes, which ultimately derive from the example of Pietro Perugino (ca. 1450-1523), who may have been the artist's teacher.