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Updated: June 29, 2025
The greatest sculptors and almost all of the most famous painters and architects of the time either were natives of Florence or did their best work there. During the first half of the century sculpture again took the lead. The bronze doors of the baptistery at Florence by Ghiberti, which were completed about 1450, are among the very best products of Renaissance sculpture.
John and certain virtues: and around the gate Ghiberti has twined an exquisite pattern of leaves and fruits and birds, it is strange to find Ghiberti's work thus completing that of Andrea Pisano, who, as it is said, had Giotto to help him, till we understand that originally these southern gates stood where now are the "Gates of Paradise" before the Duomo.
Their call was answered by Giacomo della Quercia of Siena, by Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo di Cino Ghiberti of Florence, and by two other Tuscan artists of less note. The young Donatello, aged sixteen, is said to have been consulted as to the rival merits of the proofs submitted to the judges. Thus the four great masters of Tuscan art in its prime met before the Florentine Baptistery.
We stood him before the bronze gates of Ghiberti, and walked him up and down between rows of works in pietra dura, but without any permanent effect, and when he contemplated the consecrated residences of Cimabue and Cellini, we could see that his interest was perfunctory, and that out of the corner of his eye he really considered passing fiacres.
Yet here Cimabue lived, and Ghiberti and Antonio Rossellino. Who knows what beauty has here passed by? The Benedictine Church and Convent at end of Via Pietrapiana is dedicated to S. Ambrogio. It was the first convent of nuns built in Florence, and dates certainly from the eleventh century. Like the rest, it has been suppressed, and indeed destroyed.
This is what the Italians of the Renaissance meant when, through the mouths of Ghiberti, Buonarroti, and Cellini, they proclaimed that the perfect drawing of a fine nude, "un bel corpo ignudo," was the final test of mastery in plastic art. Mr. Ruskin develops his text in sentences which have peculiar value from his lips.
We know, however, that he was the intimate friend of Brunellesco, and that it was with him he set out for Rome soon after this great and proud man had withdrawn from the contest with Ghiberti for the Baptistery gates.
They are, at any rate, very individual: there are no other doors at all like them. They are the work of Bishop Bernward. Unquestionably, one of the greatest achievements in bronze of any age is the pair of gates by Lorenzo Ghiberti on the Baptistery in Florence.
Luca also made the arms of the Guild of Merchants, with its Florentine fleur-de-lis in the midst. For the rest, Ghiberti's S. Stephen, and Ghiberti and Michelozzo's S. Matthew, on the entrance wall, are the most remarkable. The blacksmith relief is very lively and the blacksmith's saint a noble figure.
But hear what happened: two years later, to the very day, when I was leaving the look-out, I discovered a miserable tattered creature, half dead from hunger and fatigue, searching in vain for the entrance to the northern barrier. It was Lieutenant Ghiberti, come back. He fills niche Number 39 in the red marble hall." The Targa smiled slightly.
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