Consider the Tondo

Madonna della Seggiola (also known as Madonna della Sedia)Rafael - 1513-1514

Our agenda has changed as we consider Ponder Food as Love as an exhibition. 

We wish to liberate ourselves from gravity and rethink  presentations based on the Cartesian Grid  (a co-ordinate system whose axes are straight lines intersecting at right angles). Activating our upcoming exhibition installation in order to instigate pondering by our audience in a public space has motivated us to consider the tondo.  This format was quite popular in Florentine Renaissance representation of sacred and miraculous relationships. It soon fell out of favor, apparently it was considered too domestic a format to be used in important public spaces.

"The concentric system represents matter or forces of some kind that are concentrated around a center, e.g. the planets circling the sun, or children surrounding their mother...." They are therefore considered complete and unto themselves. 

Madonna and Child by Andrea Della Robia, 1435-1525 

The Holy Family, Michelangelo Buonarotti, ca.1504

 Inquiry into this form at Thinking about Art described

Round things, like bubbles, float...just like the imagined gravity-free beings. Or roll around. They can be anywhere; they are fixed nowhere. And, like a round egg (have you seen spider eggs?), a round (or spherical) object is often a self-contained "world" that has everything it that it needs to sustain itself without having access to anything beyond it. As long as the contents are "sealed into" that round or spherical container, they can exist on their own. Once the bubble breaks, however, they enter our world.... Round artworks are not meant to break. They are meant to be seen as a vision of another world that's not in our world at all and that is never going to be. Something beyond our reach. This is one reason that religious subjects are especially appropriate subjects for round artworks.