“The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
October 30, 2007-January 13, 2008
Lorenzo Ghiberti, trained as a painter and goldsmith, spent close to a quarter century creating the gilded bronze doors installed in the eastern portal of Florence’s San Giovanni Baptistery in 1452. More than five hundred years later, conservators spent as long restoring them to near-original condition. Relieved of decay, three of the doors’s narrative panels are on tour: this past spring in Atlanta, then Chicago, and on to the Metropolitan at the end of October.
Inevitably, the exhibition is a press event and an obligatory museum experience. Installed in the sixteenth-century Vélez Blanco Patio, it is also a poignant exercise in cultural estrangement in which the aura of authenticity trumps authenticity itself. But first, the doors.
Andrea Pisano designed the first set of bronze doors for the building’s southern portal in the 1330s. Its Gothic-style bas-reliefs depict the life of John the Baptist, Florence’s patron saint, plus personifications of the theological and cardinal virtues. In 1401, Ghiberti won a commission against Filippo Brunelleschi, among others, to fashion doors for the eastern portal. (Donatello was too young to compete but assisted in the victor’s workshop instead.) Following Pisano’s precedent, Ghiberti illustrated the life of Christ on twenty-eight quatrefoil reliefs.
A year after completing the first commission in 1424, he contracted for another pair representing scenes from the Hebrew Bible. By 1452, with all but the gilding done,