The figurative roundels depicted moments from ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Taken from a variety of stories, the scenes are primarily through their format………The Composition of the scenes are taken directly from antique sources, most notably, gems and cameos.

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The scene on Goliath’s helmet appears to a Triumph of Love, based on an antique sardonyx cameo which also belonged to Barbo 1457 (Pope Paul 11)…..The cameo was also used for one of the groups of roundels based on antique gems decorating the frieze of the Medici Palace courtyard. There is ample and growing of the strong interest of Donatello, fellow artists, his Medici Patrons, and their humanist friends, in antique gems and Renaissance plaquettes modelled on them, dating from early as the 1420’s. These gems were frequently loaned, exchanged, and circulated, often as collateral for debts…..

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Lorredan wrote:Two bronze Placchettes from a German producer. Note the size.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of- ... 986.319.43

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Beginning in the 1420s, a number of small cast bronze reliefs depicting the Virgin and Child were made in the circle of Donatello that may well constitute the earliest religious plaquettes. After some isolated experiments in Florence and Rome, the extensive production of plaquettes emerged, with no direct precedent, in Rome in the 1440s and 1450s, as multiple bronze castings of impressions from antique gems. The classical intaglios and cameos in the collection of the wealthy Venetian Cardinal Pietro Barbo (later Pope Paul II) were the subjects of this first phase of the art form. It was through these small reliefs that the glyptic glory of Greco-Roman art was disseminated to artists and patrons: the compositions of gems, such as Apollo and Marsyas or Diomedes and the Palladium, had profound influences on artists such as Ghiberti, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Despite their initial importance, the plaquettes based on gems are of little interest here, for although technically reproduced they are at root faithful iterations of early compositions and were soon surpassed by original compositions. Filarete, the architect and sculptor who cast a pair of monumental bronze doors for Old St. Peter’s, was among the earliest to produce original designs for plaquettes based on classically inspired imagery; classical subjects, especially as parts of series or groups, became the dominant trend in the last third of the century. Marvels of intricate low relief, plaquettes came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, from circular and oval to square, rectangular, and shield-shaped. They were collected as stand alone objects, but they were more commonly affixed to inkstands, boxes, pommels of swords or daggers, and devotional items such as reliquaries, paxes, and small tabernacles. They were also fashionably impressed into book covers and sewn onto clothing and hats. Rome and, slightly later, Mantua became the centers of plaquette manufacture after the middle of the Quattrocento, and the medium reached its zenith in the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century with artists such as Moderno and Riccio. By the end of the Cinquecento the medium had all but vanished, only flickering to life briefly in the late nineteenth century before disappearing completely.