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Updated: June 16, 2025
Three men then appeared, Brunelleschi, the architect of the Duomo, Donatello, who decorated the Campanile with statues, and Ghiberti, who cast the two gates of the baptistery, all three friends and rivals, all three having commenced with the goldsmith's art and a study of the living model, and all three passionately devoted to the antique; Brunelleschi drawing and measuring Roman monuments, Donatello at Rome copying statues and bas-reliefs and Ghiberti importing from Greece torsos, vases and heads which he restored, imitated and worshiped.
Like the pulpits of the Baptistery, of the Duomo of Pisa, and of the Duomo of Siena, it combines bas-reliefs and detached statues, carved capitals, and sculptured lions, in a maze of marvellous invention; but it has no rival in the architectonic effect of harmony, and the masterly feeling for balanced masses it displays.
In the David room are also the extremely interesting rival bronze reliefs of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, which were made by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi as trials of skill to see which would win the commission to design the new gates of the Baptistery, as I have told earlier in this book.
We hear vaguely of a Basilica of Hercules which was to be adorned with a mosaic, though what this may have been we do not know; but we still have the magnificent Arian church of S. Apollinare, which he called S. Martin de Coelo Aureo because of its beautiful gilded roof; and less perfectly there remains to us the Arian church he built, called then S. Theodore and now S. Spirito, and the Arian baptistery beside it; the ruin, known as his palace, and his mighty tomb.
Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistery echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress. I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a little, thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no other echo in the world besides this. You are right. I am unique," pursued the cicerone, "for making this echo.
Within, a Venetian Madonna and Child is preserved, Mantegnesque in style, and therefore ascribed to Mantegna or John Bellini. In the eighteenth century a picture by the latter was sent to Venice to be restored, and, if this is the picture, the restoration was very thorough. The baptistery, destroyed in 1780, had a vestibule like that at Concordia.
The Baptistery, which is a few years older than the Leaning Tower, is a stately rotunda, of huge dimensions, and was a costly structure. In it hangs the lamp whose measured swing suggested to Galileo the pendulum. It looked an insignificant thing to have conferred upon the world of science and mechanics such a mighty extension of their dominions as it has.
The year 1399 is one of the most notable in the history of modern art, since it was then that the competition for the Baptistery gates was made public, this announcement being the spring from which many rivers flowed.
One recalls, too, Catharine de' Medici with her squadron, of young and brilliant amazons Catharine de' Medici who In this palace brought forth her two sons, Francis II, and Henry III. At the end of the oval court is a dome of rich and picturesque construction, called the baptistery of Louis XIII, because that king was baptized there.
It is composed of a wreath of flower-work a constant Byzantine design with an animal in each coil; the whole enclosed between two fillets. Each animal, leaping or eating, scratching or biting, is kept nevertheless strictly within its coil, and between the fillets. Two ears of corn, or leaves, do the same thing in the mouldings round the northern door of the Baptistery at Florence.
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