Links to the Future- Lorenzo Ghiberti

Let us move now further into the renaissance, specifically the year 1381 -the birth of Lorenzo Ghiberti (c. 1381 - 1455). Ghiberti experienced much success in his lifetime, at the age of twenty-one he beat every single competitor in an international art commission and was awarded the commission to design and build a double bronze door for the north entrance of the baptistery of Florence. The win didn't come easy as Ghiberti was selected among the final seven (which also included Filippo Brunelleschi, and Jacopo della Quercia) who were given a sum of money and a year in which to complete a sample narrative panel, the subject of which was to be: "Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac." The committee wanted it to be in the same manner that sculptor Andrea Pisano had done on his door on the south side of baptistery a century ago. Pisano's style was considered highly Gothic framework gilded with graceful modeled relief figures and ornaments against a dark bronze background. The decision was to be made in Ghiberti's favor between himself and Brunelleschi. "Ghiberti's relief shows that he was still very much a Gothic artist working in the tradition of the fourteenth century." Fortunately for us, both pieces were kept so you can make the decision for yourself.

Brunelleschi's Piece:


Ghiberti's Piece:


Notice the sense of action in Brunelleschi's piece, it "reveals a new purpose in its dramatic realism and gripping sense of action."

The Scarifice of Isaac, was just one of twenty-eight pieces making up the north door, which required the help of many of Ghiberti's assisstants and took more than twenty years to complete. The door depicts twenty stories from the new testament, the four fathers of the church, the four evangelists and numerous other biblical episodes and figures. The door, once finished, was so greatly recevied by church officials that Ghiberti was commissioned to design the final door in the proposed trio of doors for the bastistery. This time Ghiberti was given the freedom to choose how he wanted the door to turn out. "Accordingly, Ghiberti discarded the restricting quatrefoil frames which he had been compelled to use before, and divided the overall space into ten panels, enabling himself much more freedom of composition. The door was later renamed Porta del Paradiso, or "Gate of Paradise," by Michelangelo, and consecrated in 1452 and showed a marked change in Ghiberti's style. "Instead of the conventional staglike settings of his first door, hw now treated each panel as a single pictorial space," different images were displayed in all of them, but always in the established Gothic Tradition.