Lorenzo Ghiberti
Master of the bronze doors.
Ghiberti won the competition for the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery in 1401 and worked on them for fifty years. Michelangelo is said to have called the later doors the “Gates of Paradise”.
Lorenzo Ghiberti was born in Florence in 1378 and was trained as a goldsmith by his stepfather. He was also a painter. When plague struck Florence in 1400 he was away travelling, but he returned to take part in the great competition for the Baptistery’s new bronze doors.
The 1401 competition called for a relief of the Sacrifice of Isaac. Ghiberti won against, among others, Filippo Brunelleschi, and both reliefs survive in the Bargello museum. Ghiberti’s was technically more accomplished and cast almost in one piece, which saved bronze. The first doors, with 28 panels, most of them from the New Testament, took over twenty years and were finished in 1424. He was immediately commissioned to make another pair of doors, on which he worked from 1425 to 1452.
The later doors, the east doors, have ten large panels with stories from the Old Testament. Here Ghiberti abandoned the Gothic frame and created images with deep perspective. The figures in the foreground almost project from the relief, while the buildings and landscape in the background become progressively flatter. The entire surface is gilded. According to Vasari, Michelangelo said the doors were worthy to be the Gates of Paradise, and the name has stuck. After restoration the originals were moved to the cathedral museum, and copies now hang on the Baptistery.
Ghiberti also made large bronze statues for the church of Orsanmichele, including St John the Baptist and St Matthew. His workshop was a school for a whole generation: Donatello, Paolo Uccello and Michelozzo all worked there. In later life he wrote the Commentarii, a work on art that contains one of the earliest surviving autobiographies by an artist. He died in 1455.
Ghiberti combined Gothic elegance with Renaissance space and classical ideals. His doors became a textbook for artists for several hundred years.