Lorenzo Ghiberti

Italian sculptor

• Born: c. 1378
• Birthplace: Pelago, near Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: December 1, 1455
• Place of death: Florence (now in Italy)

Ghiberti, one of the most famous Italian sculptors, created a sculpture for the baptistery in Florence that is often considered the first example of Renaissance art in Italy.

Early Life

Lorenzo Ghiberti (gee-BEHR-tee) was born in Pelago, near Florence, into a family connected to the arts. His father was a goldsmith, and Ghiberti was educated in that craft, which went beyond the obvious training in mechanical skill to an understanding of the problems of design and a general theoretical knowledge of art. Ghiberti began his career as a fresco painter, and he painted a very good fresco in the palace of Sigismondo Malatesta, the ruler of Rimini. He had probably gone there first to avoid the plague that had infested Florence, but in 1401 he was urged to return to Florence in order to enter a competition for a commission to produce a set of doors for the baptistery there, a building of considerable age and reputation to which the Pisan sculptor Andrea Pisano had added a much-admired set of decorated bronze doors in the 1330’.

The competition for this major project was formidable and included Filippo Brunelleschi, who had a considerable reputation. Ghiberti was still relatively unknown, and his credentials rested on his skills not as a sculptor but as a goldsmith and fresco painter. According to one report of the contest, the list of candidates was eventually reduced to Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, and the suggestion was made that the two men collaborate. Brunelleschi may have withdrawn because of a reluctance to work in tandem or because of friendship with Ghiberti. Whatever the case, Ghiberti was awarded the commission, and the rest of his artistic life was spent, in the main, on his work on the doors, since the first set (begun in 1403) led his sponsors to order a second set in 1425.

Life’s Work

The baptistery of the cathedral at Florence is separated from the main building, standing a street’s width to the west of the entrance to the church. It is a very old building, built on the site of a Roman ruin, and may have been begun as early as the fifth century. Dressed in green-and-white marble, it is a work of art in its own right. In the early 1300’, however, the Guild of Cloth Importers, which had assumed the responsibility for decorating the building, had Pisano, a Pisan sculptor, add a double-leaf door to the south side of the building. It was the first major use of bronze in Florence and proved a great artistic success, clearly indicating in its fundamentally Gothic elements the influence of classical design. This development was a precursor to the change in artistic sensibility that led to the beginnings of Renaissance sculpture.

If Pisano’s door suggested that the Gothic world was passing, it has been said that Ghiberti’s execution of the second set of doors marks the beginning of the Renaissance in Florence and the beginning of the grandest period in the use of bronze sculpture in the city. It would be unfair to patronize Pisano and his work on the baptistery; Ghiberti, while generally thought to be the finer artist, had the advantage of Pisano’s example, both technically and artistically. Bronze sculpture was a lost art in the Middle Ages, and Pisano had been obliged to bring a bell maker in from Venice to cast his doors. Ghiberti spent years training his crew in the art of bronze casting, and in the process he added to the sophistication and subtlety of the very difficult technique of that art. More important, perhaps, was the way in which Ghiberti took the design of the doors forward into the wider, freer, more dramatic world of Renaissance art.

The simplest, crudest definition of the birth of the Renaissance is that sensibility (social, religious, aesthetic indeed, psychological) of Italy turned from Heaven to the world, from God to humankind, to an appreciation of the fact that life need not simply be a preparation for the afterlife but was an exciting, potentially wide-ranging celebration of existence, however fragile that existence might be. In Greek and Roman sculptures, the artists found their models for such expressions of exultation and confidence in human beings at their best. The body became the outward, aesthetic sign not only of the beautiful soul (in Neoplatonic terms) but also of the beautiful life, the boundless possibilities for the individual and for the state. That beautiful body shows up stunningly in Ghiberti’s work on the doors. Indeed, Ghiberti’s competition piece, which was set for all the competitors, probably shows this shift most clearly how the Gothic inclination toward flatness and rejection of realism and drama had (with Pisano’s help) been overcome. Isaac, on his knees, his glowingly muscled torso turned in {I}contrapposto{/I}, his head skewed to expose his neck to Abraham’s knife, is a gorgeous young man, sculpted tenderly, with an appreciation for the human body.

The Ghiberti doors did not, however, stop at graceful celebrations of human comeliness. Ghiberti’s subjects were quite properly religious, and in his accommodation of the human figure to the stories from the Bible, he also added a realistic sense of place and a sense of psychological moment. The north door was his first commission; it took twenty-one years (from 1403 to 1424) to complete it. (Donatello, who was to become a far greater sculptor than his master, was a member of Ghiberti’s young crew.) The subjects of the twenty-eight panels included figures from the New Testament, Evangelists, and the Fathers of the Church.

Yet such seemingly austere subjects did not deter Ghiberti from putting into play a much more dramatically exciting conception of how the panels could be used. There is something flatly stagy about the Pisano work; it is splendidly worked technically, but it is somewhat stiff. Ghiberti, however, takes to the contours of the Gothic borders of the panels (a holdover from the Pisano design) with ease and makes use of the space much more gracefully. Pisano’s work is clearly rectangular, set tightly inside the flow of the margins; Ghiberti worked his design into the concave spaces, achieving a sense of space, of depth into the panels. He also possessed a deeper understanding of how to make the figures tell a story that would appeal to the emotions.

Ghiberti’s determination to make his art real, to give it depth, was his greatest gift. His second set of doors, which took up the last half of his career, were begun in the mid-1420’s and not completed until 1452. They are considered his masterpiece, and they allowed him to extend himself in ways that were severely limited in the earlier work. He was able to break away from the small panels into ten larger, rectangular spaces, which gave him not only more room but also a shape he really understood. As John Pope-Hennessy, one of his best critics, said, it is important to remember that he was a painter and that he knew how to put more than one thing into a seemingly flat, extended area.

With the second set, Ghiberti continued his biblical tales, often working a series of incidents into the bronze in ways that led to the culminating moment with considerable dramatic skill. He knew how to tell a story, and he knew how to divide his space horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in order to make the divisions support the narrative sequence of the various scenes. Also, he was much better at creating a sense of internal space within the panels.

Although Ghiberti’s international reputation rested heavily on his work on the doors, he was not confined to working on them exclusively. He was equally adept at two-dimensional design, and his windows for the cathedral, if less well known, are also masterpieces. His window depicting the Assumption of the Virgin is strongly realistic not only in its portrayal of the Virgin’s clothing but also in its depiction of her as a poignant young human being. Enthroned in a triumphant circle of swirling angels, she is proportionally sized to give a sense of depth.

There are also a handful of freestanding statues by Ghiberti in Florence. The first of these, a figure of Saint John the Baptist (1412-1416), is important for being bronze (Florentine sculptors normally worked in marble), but it is also significant because it strongly reveals an aspect of his work that can sometimes be missed in the enthusiasm for the revolutionary aspects of his bronze sculpture. This piece is clearly of an earlier time, an example of what is called the International Gothic style, and underlines the point that Ghiberti never entirely broke free from late Gothic tendencies, which can be seen closely entwined with the classical elements in all of his work, particularly in the graceful, sweeping postures that his figures often affect.

As is often the case at the beginning of a change in the artistic sensibility, Ghiberti was soon overshadowed by younger men, such as Donatello and Nanni di Banco, who were less encumbered by the last vestiges of the Gothic and whose work is less stylized, less elegantly mannered, and just slightly further down the line toward the new Humanism in their more realistic vivacity. Still, Ghiberti’s work on the baptistery, particularly in the later door, called the “Porta del Paradiso,” shows that he broke with tradition more as he grew older. At the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., there is a terra-cotta sculpture of the Madonna and Child intimate, natural, and lyrically serious which is attributed to Ghiberti; if it was indeed executed by him, it is clear that there were moments when Ghiberti was as much a Renaissance artist as Donatello.

In his later years, he kept a journal of his ideas as a practicing artist, Commentarii (c. 1447; The Commentaries of Lorenzo Ghiberti, 1948), in which he discussed not only the technical aspects of his craft but also the relation of art to society, morals, and religion. That modest pride can be seen again on the Paradise door; in one of the ornamental roundels that decorate the frame, Ghiberti’s bald, round head, his arched eyebrows, and his slightly pawky look suggest that he was a man well satisfied with what he had wrought.

Significance

If Pisano was the man responsible for bringing bronze to Florence, then Ghiberti was the artist who established its use as a medium for expressing the glorious aspirations of the Renaissance. Taking the example left by Pisano almost seventy years previous, he brought it into the mainstream of intellectual and aesthetic expression. Clearly a lesser artist than Donatello, Ghiberti was no less a major contributor to the aesthetic perfection of Florence, and his doors on the baptistery in Florence well deserve the attention they have always received. Indeed, a walk around the outside of the baptistery is a journey not only through time but also through the process whereby a civilization moves forward, in this case from modest intimations of things to come in the Pisano door through the surprising leap forward in Ghiberti’s first door to the aesthetic triumph of the second door.

Bibliography

Borsook, Eve. The Companion Guide to Florence. 6th ed. Rochester, N.Y.: Companion Guides, 1997. A guidebook to the city, this volume will help place Florence’s artists in context.

Krautheimer, Richard, in collaboration with Trude Krautheimer-Hess. Lorenzo Ghiberti. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. A biography of Ghiberti that examines his works.

Paolucci, Antonio. The Origins of Renaissance Art: The Bapistery Doors, Florence. Translated by Françoise Pouncey Chiarini. New York: Braziller, 1996. Discussion of Renaissance sculpture. Criticism and interpretation of works by Ghiberti, Andrea Pisano, and Batistero di San Giovanni.

Pope-Hennessy, John. The Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. Includes a detailed essay on Ghiberti by an expert on the subject. Excellent illustrations.

Sanders, Mary Lois. “Contest for the Doors of the Baptistery.” Calliope 4 (May/June, 1994): 10. Sanders looks back at the contest held by the city of Florence, Italy, in 1402, in which Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed for the honor of producing the decorations on the bronze doors of the baptistery. The influence of the competition on the development of Renaissance art and architecture are explored.

Walker, Paul Robert. The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World. New York: William Morrow, 2002. A close look at the competition between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi and how both artists’ work affected later artists. Bibliography and index.