Florence: Ghibeti's Gates of Paradise

Before leaving Florence's Baptistery, Edward Hutton described Ghiberti's famous doors and their great significance on the art of the Renaissance.

 

There, amid a framework of exquisite foliage, leaves, birds, and all kinds of life, he has set the gospel story in twenty panels, beginning with the Annunciation and ending with the Pentecost; and around the gate he has set the four Evangelists and the doctors of the Church and the prophets….

In looking on these beautiful and serene works, we may already notice an advance on the work of Andrea Pisano in a certain ease and harmony, a richness and variety, that were beyond the older master. Ghiberti has already begun to change with his genius the form that has come down to him, to expand it, to break down its limitations so that he may express himself, may show us the very vision he has seen. And the success of these gates with the people certainly confirmed him in the way he was going. In the third door, that facing the Duomo, which Michelangelo has said was worthy to be the gate of Paradise, it is really a new art we come upon, the subtle rhythms and perspectives of a sort of pictorial sculpture, that allows him to carve here in such low relief that it is scarcely more than painting, there in the old manner, the old manner but changed, full of a sort of exuberance which here at any rate is beauty. The ten panels which Ghiberti thus made in his own way are subjects from the Old Testament: the Creation of Adam and Eve, the story of Cain and Abel, of Noah, of Abraham and Isaac, of Jacob and Esau, of Joseph, of Moses on Sinai, of Joshua before Jericho, of David and Goliath, of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. 

 

Ghiberti: Abraham and Isaac *

 

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*Note: Looking carefully at the panel of Abraham and Isaac, at the bottom left we see Abraham offering hospitality to three visitors (angels) who return the favor by promising that his elderly wife, Sara, will finally bear him an heir. Sara looks on behind a curtain and laughs at the idea. At the upper right we see Abraham about to follow the Lord's bidding and sacrifice the heir, Isaac. At the last moment, an angel from above stops Abraham from plunging the knife into Isaac. At the bottom left, we see Isaac reconciled with his step-brother Ishmael, the son of Sara's slavegirl, Hagar.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 171-2.