Lorenzo Ghiberti
Lorenzo Ghiberti, (born c. 1378, Pelago, Italy—died Dec. 1,
1455, Florence), important early Italian Renaissance sculptor,
whose doors (Gates of Paradise; 1425–52) for the Baptistery of
the cathedral of Florence are considered one of the greatest
masterpieces of Italian art in the Quattrocento. Other works
include three bronze statues for Or San Michele (1416–25) and
the reliefs for Siena cathedral (1417–27). Ghiberti also wrote I
Commentarii, three treatises on art history and theory from
antiquity to his time.
Ghiberti’s mother had married
Cione Ghiberti in 1370, and they lived in Pelago, near Florence;
at some point she went to Florence and lived there as the
common-law wife of a goldsmith named Bartolo di Michele. They
were married in 1406 after Cione died, and it was in their home
that Lorenzo Ghiberti spent his youth. It is not certain which
man was Ghiberti’s father, for he claimed each as his father at
separate times. But throughout his early years, Lorenzo
considered himself Bartolo’s son, and it was Bartolo who trained
the boy as a goldsmith. Ghiberti also received training as a
painter; as he reported in the autobiographical part of his
writings, he left Florence in 1400 with a painter to work in the
town of Pesaro for its ruler, Sigismondo Malatesta.
Ghiberti returned quickly to
his home city when he heard, in 1401, that a competition was
being held for the commission to make a pair of bronze doors for
the Baptistery of the cathedral of Florence. He and six other
artists were given the task of representing the biblical scene
of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in a bronze relief of quatrefoil
shape, following the tradition of the first set of doors
produced by Andrea Pisano (1330–36). The entry panels of
Ghiberti and of Filippo Brunelleschi are the sole survivors of
the contest. Ghiberti’s panels displayed a graceful and lively
composition executed with a mastery of the goldsmith’s art. In
1402 Ghiberti was chosen to make the doors by a large panel of
judges; their decision brought immediate and lasting recognition
and prominence to the young artist. The contract was signed in
1403 with Bartolo di Michele’s workshop—overnight the most
prestigious in Florence—and in 1407 Lorenzo legally took over
the commission.
The work on the doors lasted
until 1424, but Ghiberti did not devote himself to this alone.
He created designs for the stained-glass windows in the
cathedral; he regularly served as architectural consultant to
the cathedral building supervisors, although it is unlikely that
he actually collaborated with Brunelleschi on the construction
of the dome as he later claimed. The Arte dei Mercanti di
Calimala, the guild of the merchant bankers, gave him another
commission, about 1412, to make a larger than life-size bronze
statue of their patron saint, John the Baptist, for a niche on
the outside of the guilds’ communal building, Or San Michele.
The job was a bold undertaking, Ghiberti’s first departure from
goldsmith-scale work; it was, in fact, the first large bronze in
Florence. Ghiberti successfully finished the St. John in 1416,
adding gilding in the following year. The technical achievement
and the modernity of its style brought Ghiberti commissions for
two similarly large bronze figures for guild niches at Or San
Michele: the St. Matthew in 1419 for the bankers’ guild and the
St. Stephen for the wool guild in 1425.
These last two commissions
brought Ghiberti into open competition with the newly prominent
younger sculptors Donatello and Nanni di Banco, who had made
stone statues for Or San Michele after Ghiberti’s first figure
there. Ghiberti’s St. John still followed many of the
conventions of the Gothic tradition. It combined small-scale
details with a larger-than-life scale that made the figure
appear overwhelmed by the drapery. Donatello’s St. Mark and St.
George and Nanni di Banco’s St. Philip and Quattro Santi
Coronati (“Four Crowned Saints”) were as large as Ghiberti’s
figure but were designed with monumental proportions to match
their scale. The boldness and strength of the weighty new
classical figures constituted a challenge for Ghiberti, but he
met it with success in his next sculptures, and maintained his
preeminent position as a leading artist in Florence.
The teens and ’20s were years
of flourishing expansion for Ghiberti and his firm. He had
completed a great deal of the modelling and casting of the
panels for the Baptistery doors by 1413, and he was in control
of a smoothly functioning workshop with many assistants. In 1417
Ghiberti was asked to make two bronze reliefs for the baptismal
font of the cathedral in Siena; he was so busy that he finished
them, under pressure from the Sienese authorities, 10 years
later. In 1419, when Pope Martin V was in Florence, Ghiberti was
called on as a goldsmith to fashion a morse and mitre for the
pontiff; unfortunately these pieces, like other examples of
Ghiberti’s art in rare stones and precious metals, have
disappeared. During these years, too, Lorenzo found a
wife—Marsilia, the 16-year-old daughter of Bartolomeo di Luca, a
wool carder. She soon bore him two sons: Tommaso was born in
1417 and Vittorio the next year; his sons later joined Ghiberti
in his business, and Vittorio continued its operation after his
father’s death. Ghiberti’s artistic success also had its
financial rewards; a surviving tax return of 1427 lists property
in Florence, land out of town, and a substantial amount of money
invested in government bonds to his credit. Over the years, his
real estate and monetary holdings continued to grow. In addition
to being well paid, Ghiberti was a businessman who managed his
affairs shrewdly. He was a well-to-do member of Florentine
society and a rich man among the artists of his time.
Ghiberti was actively involved
with and interested in other artists and their work; some
(Donatello, Paolo Uccello, Michelozzo, Benozzo Gozzoli) had
worked for a time in his workshop as young assistants.
Ghiberti’s association with the painter Fra Angelico is
documented: Ghiberti designed the frame for his Linaiuoli
Altarpiece. In his commentaries, Ghiberti exaggerates only a bit
when he proudly claims that “few important things were done in
our city which were not devised or designed by my hand”; among
his undocumented works may be noted some half-dozen floor tombs
and sarcophagi, but the vast extent to which Ghiberti’s
providing of designs and models influenced Florentine art is
hard to measure. He appears to have shared his knowledge and
talent generously and freely. Long before the completion of his
second pair of doors (the Gates of Paradise) in 1452, the fund
of figures and models assembled in connection with this work,
which the public saw only later, was open to painters of
frescoes in the Chiostro Verde (Green Cloister) of SS.
Annunziata and to the sculptor Luca della Robbia, who was
working on a marble singing gallery for the cathedral.
Naturally, the impact of the Gates increased after they were
installed.
When he was 45 years old,
Ghiberti finished the first doors. They are the effort of more
than 20 years of work and the major sculptural complex of the
International Gothic style in Italy. They show some changes in
the latest parts, however, to a more classical style that
emphasizes the bodies of figures more than the elegant draperies
that enfold them. Ghiberti created expressive, strong faces
based on examples he knew of ancient Roman art—portrait busts
and carved sarcophagi. Because of the success of the first
doors, a contract was soon signed with the Calimala for a second
pair, but the political and financial fortunes of the city and
the guild did not permit work to get underway for about five
years.
Following the completion of the
first doors, Ghiberti embarked on a decade of intense
exploration of new ways of forming pictorial space and making
gracefully active and lifelike figures. His works of the late
1420s show him able to make space increasingly intelligible in a
series of clearly receding planes; using shallow relief,
Ghiberti depicted volumes of bodies and deep architectural
spaces. Examples of these are the reliefs in Siena; the Dati
Tomb (the bronze plaque for the floor tomb of the Dominican
general Leonardo Dati); and the two shrines in Florence, Cassa
di S. Zenobius (a bronze casket with relief panels of stories
from the saint’s life) and Shrine of SS. Protus, Hyacinth, and
Nemesius (a bronze container for the relics of three martyrs).
It is likely that at this time Ghiberti encountered Leon
Battista Alberti, a young humanist scholar, who, inspired by the
new art in Florence, was composing theoretical treatises on the
visual arts. Their mutual belief that beauty was synonymous with
the conception they shared of antique art makes it difficult to
know whether or not Alberti’s ideas in De pictura (On Painting)
precede the three panels of the second door (Isaac, Joseph, and
Solomon), which are the visual equivalent of those ideas. The
beauty of antique art meant for both Alberti and Ghiberti an
idealization of nature; capturing its essence meant revealing
life by depicting movement, life’s most salient visible
characteristic. For the representation of a realistic spatial
setting for these naturalistic figures, Alberti’s treatise sets
forth a perspective system for projecting such spaces onto the
picture plane of a painting or bas-relief. Ghiberti’s three
panels seem an embodiment of the humanist’s formulations for
Renaissance pictorial art, and it is clear that any assessment
of his art must account for the incorporation of the new theory
as well as for the beauty and charm of these works. Ghiberti was
himself so proud that he claimed to have made, in all 10 panels,
architectural settings in the relation with which the eye
measures them, and real to such a degree that…one sees the
figures which are near appear larger, and those that are far off
smaller, as reality shows it.
Ghiberti’s writings, I Commentarii (probably completed around
1447), shed more light on his humanist interests.The
commentaries are composed of three books. The first, a history
of art in ancient times, is Ghiberti’s digest of writings of
Latin authors on the subject; in it he reveals his belief that
the inseparability of practice and theory is responsible for the
excellence of ancient art. The second book records the art of
the immediate past, and Ghiberti expresses his admiration for
certain Sienese painters and for a late 14th-century northern
goldsmith named Gusmin who is known only through Ghiberti’s
pages; this book includes an autobiography, in which Ghiberti
establishes his place in the history of art. The last book was
apparently more theoretical, but in the surviving manuscript it
is fragmentary. The commentaries demonstrate Ghiberti’s
confidence in his position as an important leader in the
Florentine Renaissance—one interested in recapturing the art of
the ancients and studying it as a humanist scholar would, and
one who developed a new style all’antica in which he freely
created art works with a grace and beauty that have been found
winning since their invention.
Constance Lowenthal
Encyclopædia Britannica
