De todos es conocida la vitalidad artística que rebosabada en Florencia en el Renacimiento. A inicios de ese nuevo fenómeno cultural, conocido como Quattrocento, concretamente en 1401, se convoca una competición para realizar las segundas puertas del baptisterio de Florencia (las primeras las realizó Andrea Pisano). El tema era el sacrificio de Isaac y debía ser realizado en un cuarterón de bronce con los bordes lobulados. Entre los finalistas, destacaron:

• Ghiberti
• Brunelleschi
• Jacopo della Quercia

Sin embargo, la decisión final quedó entre los dos primeros. Jacopo della Quercia fue el primer escultor florentino en realizar escultura para ser vista desde todos los ángulos y trató el cuerpo humano en toda su plenitud. Realizó los relieves sobre el génesis en el Portal de San Petronio (Bolonia).

Portal de San Petronio, Bolonia; Jacopo della Quercia

Lorenzo Ghiberti fue elegido ganador. En Ghiberti la disposición del paisaje y de las figuras crea una sugerencia espacial nueva que, en el caso de Brunelleschi, se convierte, como se ha notado, en una construcción espacial de nuevo signo. No obstante, una formulación coherente del nuevo sistema de representación no se producirá en el relieve hasta algo más tarde.
La obra de Ghiberti mantiene el enmarcamiento de tipo tradicional. La composición conserva elementos del gótico internacional, como la curva que describe la figura de Abraham y la forma acartonada del paisaje, junto con innovaciones clásicas como es el volumen y modelos utilizados en las demás figuras.Tras realizar estas Segundas puertas del Baptisterio de Florencia (sacrificio de Isaac); se le encargaron también las terceras (llamadas por Miguel Ángel “Puertas del paraíso” por considerarlas de gran perfección) en las que logra una sensación de perspectiva fascinante, hasta el punto de influir en el gran Donatello.

Sacrificio de Isaac, de Filippo Brunelleschi

Brunelleschi, tras fracasar en el Concurso de 1401 y se reorienta hacia la Arquitectura y será conocido por ser el creador de la Catedral de Florencia, Santa María dei Fiori (Santa María de las Flores) más conocida como Il Duomo (es decir, "la Catedral", como única). Para mí, uno de los más fascinantes monumentos por su cuidado exterior.

After more than 25 years, the conservation of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s doors for the Baptistery in Florence—called the Gates of Paradise—now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, is nearing completion. This exhibition provides the American public with an unprecedented opportunity to see three of the doors' famous narrative reliefs, with their masterful retelling of Old Testament subjects, as well as four figural sections from their opulent surrounding frames, before they are permanently installed in the museum. The panels and elements from the doorframe—two of its supremely elegant figures of prophets and finely modeled heads set in roundels—represent the sculptor’s intense involvement in this project, a seminal monument of the Italian Renaissance, during the 27 years (1425–52) of its creation."

"This extensively illustrated book displays the full glory and elaborate details of many of the newly restored bronze panels, the extraordinary work of the conservators and restorers who cleaned the priceless doors. In a series of fascinating chapters, expert contributors capture Ghiberti’s world, his remarkable talent at representing human emotion in rich illusionistic settings, the relationships between Renaissance patrons and artists, and the collaborations and rivalries among artists. Other chapters explore the challenging craft of bronze sculpture, Ghiberti’s casting and finishing techniques, and the painstaking process involved in documenting and restoring the treasured doors. A chronology of Ghiberti’s life completes this lavishly produced volume"

da "La Stampa"

New painting alert -- you can see it in person right now at Kolok Gallery in the "Contemporary Berkshires" exhibit.

Ghibert's Maxim as Solar Fusions

10" x 7" oil panels

The top panel shows an image, based on a plein aire sketch, from a humidity-laden sunset near the top of Pine Cobble in Williamstown, MA - a local, specific artistic interpretation of the earth's orbit around the sun, furnace of our survival. The bottom panel's glowing orb was based on a telescope photograph of Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis) taken by the Hubble Space Telescope using the Faint Object Camera on March 3, 1995 or January 15, 2006, photo credit: Andrea Dupree (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), Ronald Gilliland (STScI), NASA and ESA. This may have been the Hubble's first photo of a star other than the sun. Betelgeuse, a red giant, is like what our sun will become - large enough to engulf most of the solar system. Carl Sagan once wrote that we are all star stuff, literally, borne out of matter forged by the fusion reactors within stars. Generations earlier, the artist Ghiberti simply said ‘Without light there is no art.'

Michelangelo made this low-relief when he was a boy. If he weren't the author it would have been dumped long ago. Why did HE hang onto it? Because it reminded him of the good times when he knew so little and yet tried so hard. He smiled at those beginner's defects.

The Virgin, dressed like a Roman matron from classical times, sits there stiffly. That is the influence on the boy of the Massacio frescoes he had been copying or of some old Roman gravestone figures. But the drapery is unusually alive. Except for her face, her hands and feet, the Virgin is completely covered and yet defined everywhere by the cloth, which is as restless and as playful as a living thing. Everywhere it “does things”. It sits in a little pile of folds on the Virgin's shoulder and hangs down her back, ready to be pulled closed like a curtain once the Child is finished nursing. It stretches out flat on her thigh, then rests on the seat awhile before falling off the step—and not very freely even then. It gets caught on the corner of her seat. It winds around her ankle. It plays on and on.

Michelangelo smiled again when he saw how the perspective trick had failed.
He had had those doors of Ghiberti in his head—he thought he would put some of that much-praised new linear perspective into his first relief. He drew the Virgin and some angels (or boys) on the marble slab. How about having a stairway? The angels could be at the top of the stairs, high up in the frame. The steps would become slightly smaller as they rose to the top, and the bannister would taper. The eye would then be fooled into believing that those angels were behind the Virgin, playing while she was daydreaming at the foot of the stairs.

But the perspective lines failed; they didn't do their trick.
The enthusiastic young Michelangelo had remembered that if you were looking at the angels from downstairs, you wouldn’t be able to see their feet, and so he very properly, following the logics of the illusion, drew them cut off at the knees. That was all right. The problem here was that, though you might believe those angels are horsing around behind the Virgin and that the biggest on the left is calling to the one on the right (to get him out of bed?), they and the big seated Virgin have nothing to do with each other. The excited angel on the stairs is so close to the Virgin’s head that, until you see how you are supposed to understand the relief, it looks as though he is talking to her.
There was another problem with the steps themselves: shouldn't the tops of some of them (the lowest) be visible?

Besides the great concert of folds, what is outstanding in the relief is the beautiful Michelangelo-esque back of the Child, which reminds you of the big Notte in the Medici Chapel, carved forty years later. And the Virgin’s hands, though they are very big.

Michelangelo learned his lesson here. Seeing the dangers of those perspective lines in a relief, he never tried them again. Wisely.

I paid a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday to see the exhibition of the three restored panels from Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, on loan from the Baptistry of Florence. While I was there, I visited some old favorites, Ingres' portrait of Madame de Broglie being preeminent on that list. Two tricksters playing with our heads, these artists.

Standing in front of the noblewoman, listening to the comments of the people passing buy, I hear over and over again, "It looks so real...amazing!" Truly, Ingres was a master of paint. The rendering of the textures of the silk dress and chair are absolutely dazzling, but are they realistic? Does silk ever look quite that voluptuous? We live in an age where photographic imagery saturates our time and space - we know what "realistic" looks like. In his day, Ingres was faced with cameras as competition - some people said that painting could never measure up! He wasn't phased. He painted as if cameras were both irrelevant and paltry. "You want realism - I'll give you realism you can't get from a camera!" So, he draws us in with his technical mastery, his delight in surfaces and color, and he paints a woman whose arms seem to be made of rubber - do they have bones? What's with that right arm, hand tucked away, the wrist looking like it's twisted all out of shape? That neck, a bit elongated wouldn't you say? Is that natural? He gives us the image he wants to create - realism is the least of it.

As for Ghiberti, he lived in a time when the "realistic" representation of space with formal perspective was a thrilling device. Look at the architecture in this image of Issac from the same set of panels.

(click to enlarge)

Notice the grid lines in the floor, receding to infinity like parallel railroad lines - this was exciting stuff six centuries before we became accustomed to virtual reality! In the panel at the top, showing the creation of Adam (left), the creation of Eve (center) , and the expulsion (right) the figures are in various stages of relief to indicate their distance, the architecture is radically distorted - the arch on the right where they are being kicked out of Eden looks like something from an Expressionist nightmare, and the beautiful, classical maiden, like Botticelli's Venus, rises weightlessly from Adam's side, drawn out by God the Father.

NY Times Review

Most of the historic sculptures, frescoes and edifices of early-15th-century Florence are not the least bit portable. It’s simple: You want to see them, you go to Florence. But right now nearly a third of one of the city’s greatest glories can be seen without leaving town, by visiting “The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What doors? Lorenzo Ghiberti's bronze doors of the Baptistry of St. John’s in Florence. They are covered with gilded bronze reliefs showing scenes from the Old and New Testaments and they are some of the most famous sculpture ever made.

Painters weren't the only ones to go crazy over the newly discovered laws of perspective: sculptors tried to use them too. Ghiberti had an infallible eye and probably no one could make relief pictures that followed those laws better than his bronze plaques. But rather than prove that using those laws you can have depth in a relief, including landscape in the background, Ghiberti's doors show that you can’t—at least that you probably shouldn’t. Good as the doors are, they seem to be simply in the wrong medium. They should have been paintings.

Those laws of linear perspective were not made for sculptural relief. There is too much plain drawing on Ghiberti's bronze; and the trick of lower and lower reliefing as the figures and buildings recede into the background doesn’t really work unless one's eye has already been educated by looking at a lot of paintings and is willing to play along. When the sun shines on the flat bronze slabs and casts its inevitable shadows, the whole trompe l'oeil is exposed: the half-modelled figures in the distance cast their shadows the same as the fully-modelled figures in the foreground and pop right out of the plaque. And their shadows don’t give a hoot for the careful perspective lines that were laid down to guide the eye. Those shadows obey the sun. You might be reminded of the problem desert soldiers had to camouflage their trucks and artillery so that enemy airplanes wouldn’t see them. They painted them the same color as the sand but still the planes had no trouble spotting them because of their stubborn shadows.

The "Gates of Paradise" which Ghiberti was commissioned to design in 1425 are renowned as a masterpiece of the Renaissance. The pair of bronze doors were designed for the Baptistery in Florence, Italy. Taking 27 years to complete, the gates became a masterpiece so much so, that even Michelangelo took note.

For the past 25 years, the gates have undergone much conservation. To mark this conclusion of the conservation efforts, three relief panels from the left wing of the Gates of Paradise and sections of the door’s frieze will be on display at the Art Institute. After the exhibition, the relief panels to will re-integrated with the rest of the gates and placed on permanent display at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, and will never travel again.

Learn More about the Gates of Paradise and the exhibition by visiting the Art Institute of Chicago's website. And check out the expanded version of the exhibition here.