Roberta Olson explores an important phenomenon in Italian Renaissance art: the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century flowering of the tondo (or circular) form in painting and sculpture, which represented the Renaissance ideal of the perfect form. The Florentine Tondo fills a major gap in Florentine artistic and cultural history, collating documentary, textual, and artistic material with new evidence and discoveries about patronage, location, function, and iconography; it also charts the patterns of tondi production and establishes their meaning within a cultural context. In explaining the iconography of specific tondi, Professor Olson illuminates a further facet of Renaissance culture: many of her analyses provide answers to previously puzzling issues. Technical information and bibliography is provided for each tondo, making a significant contribution to the understanding of this specific genre as well as to Italian Renaissance art and culture in general.