I lemmi “ovato” e “tondo”: due termini vasariani complessi alla luce delle rese russe

This article, arising from the Lexicon of Cultural Heritage (LBC) research unit, analyzes the complex meaning of two specialized terms from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (Le Vite): “ovato” and “tondo”. The study uses the complete 1956-1971 Russian translation as a parallel corpus to investigate the multifaceted semantics (polysemy) of Vasari’s artistic vocabulary. The analysis confirms that a single Italian term often requires multiple Russian equivalents (овал, кессон for ovato; тондо, круг, лунета for tondo), highlighting how translators sought to clarify the specific meaning of the artistic object (in the domains of painting, sculpture, architecture) that remained implicit in the original text, thus confirming the complexity and semantic richness of the specialized terminology in Le Vite.