Lorenzo Ghiberti

• 1. Introduction

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  Lorenzo Ghiberti was a Florentine sculptor who spent most of his working life making two sets of bronze doors for a single building. That building was the Florence Baptistery, known formally as the Battistero di San Giovanni. The doors he produced there became two of the most celebrated objects of the Italian Renaissance. The second set was so extraordinary that Michelangelo gave it a name that has endured ever since: the Gates of Paradise. What kind of artist earns that name from Michelangelo? What does it take to spend more than four decades working on the same assignment and still produce something the world calls a masterpiece? And what happens to the workshop where those doors were made, where Donatello and Paolo Uccello learned their craft? Ghiberti's story begins not in a sculptor's studio but on a goldsmith's bench, and it passes through a plague, a competition, a rivalry with one of the great architects in history, and a set of ten bronze panels that art historian Antonio Paolucci called the most important event in Florentine art during the first quarter of the fifteenth century.

• 2. A Goldsmith's Education

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  Ghiberti was born in 1378 in Pelago, a comune about twenty kilometres from Florence. The man who raised him, Bartolo di Michele, was a goldsmith. The circumstances of Ghiberti's parentage were complicated. His mother Fiore had been married to a man named Cione di Ser Buonaccorso Ghiberti, but at some point she moved to Florence and began living with Bartolo. The two maintained a common-law marriage for years, and questions about Ghiberti's biological father were never settled. What is settled is that Bartolo was the only father Lorenzo knew, and their bond was described as close and affectionate. Bartolo was by all accounts clever and well-regarded in Florence. It was from his bench that Ghiberti learned the first principles of design.

  Training as a goldsmith was not a narrow education. Ghiberti grew interested in modelling copies of antique medals and turned his attention to painting as well. He received formal instruction as a painter from Gherardo Starnina before returning to work in Bartolo's workshop. When the bubonic plague struck Florence in 1400, Ghiberti left the city for Rimini. There he found work under Carlo I Malatesta, assisting in the completion of frescoes on the walls of Malatesta's castle. It was there, by most accounts, that his deep feeling for painting solidified into something lasting. Not long after arriving, though, word reached him from Florence. The governors of the Baptistery were holding a competition and were seeking masters skilled in bronze working.

• 3. The 1401 Competition

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  In 1401, the Arte di Calimala, the Cloth Importers Guild, announced a competition for new bronze doors intended for the Baptistery. The civic motivation behind the commission was partly devotional. The doors would serve as a votive offering to mark Florence's survival of the Black Death in 1348. Each of the competing artists received four brass tablets and was required to produce a relief depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac, sized and shaped to match the door panels. Each artist had a year to complete the work. From many entrants, judges narrowed the field to seven semifinalists: Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Simone da Colle, Francesco di Val d'Ombrino, Niccolo d'Arezzo, Jacopo della Quercia da Siena, and Niccolo Lamberti.

  By 1402, when the judging took place, only Ghiberti and Brunelleschi remained. The jury could not decide between the two and initially proposed they work together. Brunelleschi refused and went to Rome to study architecture, leaving the then twenty-one-year-old Ghiberti to carry out the commission alone. Ghiberti later wrote in his autobiography that he had won "without a single dissenting voice." The two original competition panels are preserved today at the Bargello museum in Florence. The technical differences between them were not trivial. Brunelleschi assembled his panel from separately cast individual pieces fixed onto a bronze framework. Ghiberti cast nearly all of his figures, except for Isaac himself, as a single unified piece, and he hollowed them out from the inside. The result was a panel that was stronger, lighter, and used less bronze than Brunelleschi's entry. Those practical advantages played a role in the jury's deliberations alongside the artistic qualities of each work.

• 4. Twenty-One Years, Twenty-Eight Panels

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  After the competition, Bartolo helped his son refine the design before the casting began. In 1403 a formal contract was signed with Bartolo di Michele's workshop, and it became overnight the most prestigious studio in Florence. By 1407 Lorenzo had legally assumed control of the commission himself and was prohibited from taking other work during that period. He was paid two hundred florins a year. The physical production was carried out in a studio called the Aja, or Threshing Floor, located near the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, the oldest hospital still operating in Florence. Ghiberti built a large furnace at the Aja to melt the metal. His first attempt at casting the doors failed. On the second attempt he succeeded, using 34,000 pounds of bronze at a cost of 22,000 ducats.

  The project consumed twenty-one years. The completed first set of doors consists of twenty-eight panels. Twenty of them depict the life of Christ drawn from the New Testament, covering scenes from the Annunciation through to Pentecost. The eight lower panels portray the four evangelists and four Church Fathers: Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Gregory, and Saint Augustine. The panels are framed by foliage and gilded busts of prophets and sibyls at the intersections. On the 19th of April 1424, the doors were installed on the north side of the Baptistery. Art historian Antonio Paolucci described this installation as the most important event in the history of Florentine art in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. Among the artists who trained in Ghiberti's workshop during those years were Donatello, Masolino, Paolo Uccello, and Antonio del Pollaiuolo.

• 5. The Gates of Paradise

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  In 1425, before the first set of doors had been long in place, Ghiberti received a second commission for the Baptistery. This time the location was the east side, facing the Duomo, and the subjects were chosen by Leonardo Bruni d'Arezzo, then chancellor of the Republic of Florence. Ghiberti worked on this second commission for twenty-seven years, and he brought his son Vittorio and the painter Benozzo Gozzoli, as well as Michelozzo, into the workshop.

  The difference in design from the first set was deliberate and dramatic. Where the first set used twenty-eight panels framed in the traditional Gothic quatrefoil, this new commission gave Ghiberti ten large rectangular scenes with no such framing at all. Each panel carries multiple episodes from a single Old Testament story. The ten stories, in order, are Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, and Solomon. Ghiberti used the recently understood principles of perspective to give depth to each composition. Within the same panel, he moved between incised lines for distant figures and near free-standing sculpture for those in the foreground, a range of technique sometimes called rilievo schiacciato, a method of flattened relief associated with Donatello. Giorgio Vasari, writing a century after the doors were completed, called them "undeniably perfect in every way" and "the finest masterpiece ever created." Ghiberti himself described them as "the most singular work that I have ever made." Michelangelo's name for them has stuck. The two central busts in the surrounding framework are self-portraits: one of Ghiberti and one of his father, Bartolomeo.

• 6. The Commentarii and Alhazen

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  Ghiberti was not only a maker of objects. He was a collector of classical artefacts, a practitioner of humanist scholarship, and the author of an unfinished text called the Commentarii. This work contains what is considered the earliest surviving autobiography by any artist. In it, Ghiberti traces the development of art from the time of Cimabue forward through his own career. His description of the second bronze portal is quoted directly by art historians as evidence of what Renaissance artists were actually trying to accomplish. He wrote that in this work he sought "to imitate nature as closely as possible, both in proportions and in perspective" and that the buildings in the panels "appear as seen by the eye of one who gazes on them from a distance."

  Recent scholarship has identified an unexpected source behind Ghiberti's thinking about visual perception. The Arab polymath Alhazen wrote about the optical basis of perspective in the early eleventh century. His work, known as the Book of Optics, was translated into Italian in the fourteenth century under the title Deli Aspecti. Ghiberti quoted from it at length in the third section of his Commentarii. The scholar A. Mark Smith has argued that through Ghiberti, Alhazen's thinking about optics may have been central to the development of artificial perspective in early Renaissance Italian painting. Ghiberti's workshop was also a meeting point for some of the key figures in that development. Paolo Uccello, commonly regarded as the first great master of perspective, worked there for several years. Donatello, known for one of the earliest examples of central-point perspective in sculpture, also spent time in the same studio. The Commentarii, left unfinished at Ghiberti's death, became a primary source for Giorgio Vasari's Vite.

• 7. Bronze Saints for Orsanmichele

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  Between the two great Baptistery commissions, Ghiberti produced monumental bronze statues for the church of Orsanmichele in Florence. The first, a figure of St. John the Baptist commissioned by the Arte di Calimala guild, was built between 1412 and 1416. Standing eight feet four inches tall, it demonstrated a casting skill that contemporaries found remarkable. Ghiberti drew on the Gothic tradition visible in his native Italy, evident in the elegant curves of the sword and drapery.

  The Arte del Cambio, Florence's bankers' guild, commissioned a statue of St. Matthew, which Ghiberti executed between 1419 and 1423. At eight feet ten inches, it stood taller than the St. John the Baptist by guild specification: they had asked for a statue at least as tall as or taller than the one next to it. A third statue, St. Stephen, was produced for the Arte della Lana, the Wool Manufacturers' Guild. These commissions placed Ghiberti's bronze figures in public view across the city even as his Baptistery work was ongoing. In 1453, Ghiberti and Vittorio were also commissioned to add a door frame to the earlier south doors designed by Andrea Pisano, which had originally been installed on the east side of the Baptistery in 1329 and moved to their present location in 1452.

• 8. Family, Wealth, and Death

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  By 1417 Ghiberti had married Marsila, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Bartolommeo di Lucca, a comb-maker. They had two sons. Tommaso was born in 1417, and Vittorio arrived a year later. Ghiberti prospered far beyond most of his contemporaries. A tax return from 1427 records that he held considerable land both within Florence and outside the city, as well as substantial investments in government bonds. His real estate and financial holdings continued to grow over the following decades.

  Vittorio followed his father as a goldsmith and bronze-caster. He worked alongside Lorenzo as a collaborator and, after his father's death, completed the door frame for Pisano's panels that Lorenzo had not lived to finish. Vittorio is buried beside his father in the Basilica di Santa Croce, and their shared gravestone honours Lorenzo's doors for the Baptistery and Vittorio's ornamental work on Andrea da Pisa's doors. Buonaccorso, Vittorio's son, took the family craft in a different direction entirely: his metal castings took the form of artillery and cannonballs, and he gained fame as a supplier of weapons for the wars of Sarzana and Pisa. Lorenzo Ghiberti died on the 1st of December 1455 in Florence, at the age of seventy-five, after succumbing to a fever of unknown cause. In 2007 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition called The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece, displaying three of the doors' narrative reliefs along with four figural sections from the surrounding frames before their permanent installation in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.