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By Root 2882 0

Florence was enjoying a period of peace, prosperity and civic pride, and its elders decided to commission a second Baptistry door. Andrea Pisano’s doors were the standard of excellence against which the new generation of sculptors was to be judged. The ensuing competition of 1401 has often been treated as the single event that marked the real onset of the Florentine Renaissance. It was certainly a remarkable occasion. There were thirty-four judges, drawn not just from the cathedral authorities but from the city guilds and from surrounding towns. They advertised the contest all over Italy, and masters or would-be masters arrived from the entire peninsula. The field was narrowed down to seven, including three of the greatest artists of the entire period: Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Jacopo della Quercia (1374–1438) and Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455). Each of those short-listed was given four sheets of bronze and told to conceive a design to illustrate “The Sacrifice of Isaac.”

Only two of the designs, by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, have survived, and the judges had a hard task deciding between them. In fact, they took two years to make up their minds, conscious of the size of the project and the enormity of the expense. (The eventual cost was 22,000 florins, equal to the entire defense budget of the city of Florence.) Ghiberti got the contract, probably because the judges thought he was the man most likely to carry through the job to a triumphant conclusion. And they were right. As Ghiberti boasts in his Autobiography, he put art before “the chase after lucre.” He was astonishingly conscientious and an obsessional perfectionist. He appears to us a very slow worker, but one has to bear in mind that the standards of craftsmanship demanded and provided in late medieval, early Renaissance times were of a quality inconceivable to the modern age, and speed of execution was not possible. Ghiberti would spend years on a single piece of jewelry or a tombstone, months on hand chasing a piece of bronze. Three years was normal for him in creating a large marble statue.

Ghiberti was a young man in 1403 when he started on the bronze doors, completing the original contract twenty years later. He was then given a further commission to decorate a third set of doors, later known as the Gate of Paradise by Michelangelo. Ghiberti finished them in 1452, three years before his death. So he spent virtually his entire working life, more than half a century, on these Florentine doors. He had many gifted assistants, including Donatello (1386–1466), Benozzo Gozzoli (c. 1420–97), Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), and Antonio del Pollaiuolo (1431–98) and perhaps Luca Della Robbia (c. 1399–1482), so that his workshop was one of the great creative furnaces of the Renaissance. But he himself was the artist-creator down to the last micromillimeter. As Ghiberti himself claimed, this cumulatively huge work (his first door alone carried twenty-eight panels, which with borders weighed thirty-four thousand pounds), was executed “with much care and industry . . . understanding and artifice.” The state of the art was such that some castings failed and had to be done again, and even the successful casts required finishing, which in some cases took years. Ghiberti’s doors, re-creating the scriptures in dramatic life, were the cynosure of artists and collectors from all over Italy, who came to admire and learn. They summed up everything the Renaissance had accomplished so far, and marked the way ahead for younger artists.

The sculptor who absorbed Ghiberti’s lessons most productively, and built on his work most confidently, was Donatello. His life and work tell us a great deal about the Renaissance, what it was and what it was not. The ideas behind the Renaissance, particularly the overwhelming desire, in letters, to get at the truth and, in art, to present the truth as we see it, were a force that pushed writers and artists to the highest levels. But the Renaissance was not determinative. Artists, in particular, were not forced to conform to its aims by its compulsive