Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise
Metropolitan Museum Offers Rare Viewing of Gates of Paradise, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Magnificent Renaissance Masterpiece
Exhibition dates: October 30, 2007 – January 13, 2008 – Exhibition location: Vélez Blanco Patio – Press preview: Monday, October 29, 10:00 a.m. – noon
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Adored by generations of artists – including Michelangelo, who is reputed to have given them the name “Gates of Paradise” – the magnificent gilded bronze doors of the east portal of the Baptistery in Florence are among the seminal monuments of the Italian Renaissance. The massive 17-feet-high doors were created by the eminent Florentine goldsmith, sculptor, and designer Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), who decorated them with ten evocative, highly charged, and magically atmospheric scenes from the Old Testament, each superbly carried out in relief ranging from high to low. After more than 25 years of conservation, seven elements of this masterpiece – including three of the narrative reliefs for which they are famous – are in the United States for the first and only time since their creation more than 500 years ago. The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view them at The Metropolitan Museum of Art begins October 30. After the conclusion of their four-city United States tour, the works return to Florence, to be reassembled in their original bronze framework and placed in a specially designed, hermetically sealed case in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, never to travel again.
The exhibition is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Oceanic Heritage Foundation.
It was organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in collaboration with the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence.
The exhibition is supported by an indemnity by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ghiberti placed ten brilliantly visualized scenes from the Old Testament amid surrounding frames that include 24 heads and 24 statuettes of Biblical heroes, heroines, prophets, and sibyls, all enclosed within a lush frieze of the flora and fauna of Tuscany. All offer proof of his unique ability to combine compositional strength with the utmost delicacy, creating rich pictorial effects and perspectives that were unprecedented. He employed various grades of relief in combination – some figures are shown nearly in the round, while others barely rise above the surface – a subtly intricate modeling technique that he practiced magisterially. The whole was enhanced through the use of fire gilding. To design and make the massive doors took Ghiberti and his workshop 27 years (1425-52); to conserve the doors and bring them back to their original splendor has taken an equivalent amount of time.
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