Ghiberti: The Gates of Paradise

This lecture moves on to the years 1425–50, but remains right in the heart of the ‘ancient circle’ of the walls of Florence. The political and social context stays just the same; Florence was still an independent city state, whose wealth depended on the woollen industry, trade and banking. It remained a genuine republic, and its governing class was still drawn exclusively from merchants and professional men in the ‘major’ guilds.

To bring us up to the crucial period, in fact, I need only make two additional points. First, that Florentine self-awareness and pride had been enhanced as a result of a series of three extended wars against successive dukes of Milan, and against the King of Naples.

The map below shows the extent to which Florence had been encircled by the Duke of Milan—his possessions are shown in green—at the gravest moment of the earliest and worst of these wars. Things looked as bleak in Florence in 1401 as they did in Britain in 1940.

The existence, accordingly, of a certain ‘Battle of Britain’ spirit helps to explain a very substantial new investment in public art—in buildings and in statues—in order to complete a number of great projects which had been begun a hundred years earlier.

Second, it was the major guilds which had taken on direct responsibility for the completion, maintenance and decoration of these public buildings, with the result that there was rivalry—of a kind fruitful for the arts—between the different guilds. The statues by Donatello intended for the niches on the street walls of Orsanmichele, which we saw in the previous lecture, were done between 1413 and 1417 for the Guild of Linenmakers and for the Guild of Armourers; the two figures depicted, St. Mark and St. George, were their patron saints:

Between 1418 and 1425, Brunelleschi designed and built the façade of the Foundling Hospital for the Guild of Silk Merchants and Goldsmiths:

Then, in the following years, he masterminded the building of the gigantic cupola over the cathedral, at the expense of the wealthiest and most powerful Guild, the one involved in the production and marketing of the highest quality woolen cloth, called Calimala.

It was the same guild which had responsibility for the Baptistery, a much older structure lying immediately to the East of the site chosen for the Cathedral in the 1290s. The Baptistery was always a very important building in an Italian commune, but it had a particular importance in Florence since the city was dedicated to St John the Baptist.

It was not uncommon to have magnificent bronze doors for these Baptisteries, and so, in the great days of the city’s expansion in Dante’s lifetime, a superb door was commissioned from a Pisan sculptor called Andrea, which had 28 quatrefoil panels, the upper 20 of which tell the story of the St John the Baptist, who is pictured in the detail baptising Jesus.

I do not want to spend much time on this earlier work, but we must just glance at the scene of the boy John setting out into the Wilderness, and at Andrea’s version of the climax of the Dance of Salome, when she receives the Baptist’s head as her reward.

This door, now the South door, was completed in 1336, in the decade when the Florentine economy began to go badly wrong, even before the city was hit by the catastrophe of the Black Death in 1348–9. But Florence did recover, and in 1401 the Guild of Calimala decided to commission another bronze door to stand opposite the Cathedral.

It was to be more or less identical to the existing one, in that it would have 28 little scenes in quatrefoils, but the ‘top 20’, in this case, would be given over to the Life of the Saviour. A competition was held to find the best artist, which prescribed Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice Isaac as the subject of the test panel; and the image below is the entry submitted by one of the greatest runners up in the history of Art—none other than Brunelleschi:

However, the commission was awarded to Lorenzo Ghiberti, whom you see below in two self-portrait busts, each in reality no bigger than your fist; that on the left is from the North Door, and that on the right, of him as an older man, is from the Gate of Paradise:

Once again, I do not want to dwell on this gate for too long—because this is not the Gate of Paradise. But I must give you an opportunity to look at four of the scenes—The Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Walking on the Water, and the Resurrection—reminding you that each panel is only twenty inches high:

In the early 1420s, Ghiberti received a commission from Siena to cast bronze panels for the font in their new Baptistery. He shared the commission with others, including Donatello, and he must have been profoundly influenced by Donatello’s interpretation of the climax of the dance of Salome, which I showed you in the previous lecture:

This was a panel measuring two feet square, considerably more advanced, in every possible respect, and also more emotionally involved than Andrea’s, in which Donatello made very significant innovations that Ghiberti himself would soon adopt.

Without going too much into detail about the technique of casting bronze, I should make two essential points concerning the method of these artists.

We can now return to the Baptistery in Florence—pictured above is the North Door—and begin to talk about the doors that used to face the Cathedral (before they were moved to the museum)—the East Doors, known as the ‘Gates of Paradise’, a name that goes back at least as far as Michelangelo, who said: ‘that they were so beautiful that they would not be out of place “alle porte del paradiso”’.

The commission for this new door was assigned in the same year, 1425, that Ghiberti installed the first door. By this time, he was in his late forties and could dictate his own terms; and it was apparently at his own insistence that there are not twenty-four quatrefoils, but ten square panels, like those he had done for Siena, just over two and a half feet wide.

I could easily devote a whole lecture to the frame alone—to the flora and fauna, and especially to the twenty prophets and sibyls, who flank the narratives, such as these four which lie in the bottom row, with their exquisite rhythms in the drapery and scrolls:

However, as I want to leave myself plenty of time to take you through the ten narrative panels with a proper attention to detail, I must press on. All the panels are illustrations to the Old Testament; but each one has a different protagonist, and each tells a story complete in itself, comprising a number of episodes which are cunningly distributed over the surface of the panel in a unified composition.

LEFT and RIGHT [FIXME Ghiberti Diagram of names and subjects is missing (placeholder says moved to Neptune 4 R8 Ghiberti 1993 L3); it is also not clear what the RIGHT slide is meant to be—possibly a detail of the fifth panel to illustrate to the audience the manner of composition—as the order of slides here seems somewhat mixed up; this goes for a number of the succeeding slides in this introductory part on Christian history and prefiguration]

Although the first six panels do not omit many significant episodes from Genesis, the last four are drawn from different books. That being said, it is important not to reconcile ourselves too readily to the idea that we are dealing simply with ‘stories from the Old Testament’ and nothing more than that, for there are links between recurrent situations, and recurrent images that bind the panels together, and which throw light on the meaning of baptism and the functions of a Baptistery.

It is these that I particularly want to emphasise in this lecture—these recurrent, unifying features which are all derived from the once-orthodox Christian interpretation of the history of the Jews, an interpretation which lingers on in the fact that we still date any historical event as being either ‘AD’ or ‘BC’.

Remember, then, that for the educated Christian in the fifteenth century—and for many centuries before and after—the division of time into two eras also carried the implication that time was finite, and that history was marked out by three main points. There had been a beginning, and a mid- or turning point; and there would be a last day, a Day of Judgement after which there would be no more time, but an eternity in which the immortal soul of every individual would find itself for ever ‘face to face’ with God, or forever ‘back to back’ with God, depending on the use the individual had made of his or her existence in time.

I will not say anything more about the end of time, or divine judgement, but you must bear in mind that you cannot have a distinctively Christian view of history unless you correlate time and eternity, and unless you believe that God is involved with man, and man with God.

Instead, I must now introduce a distinction between time and history in order to clarify the relation of the ‘middle’ to the beginning.

The beginning of time lay in a free act of God, the creation of the universe. The beginning of history lay in a free human act, Adam’s disobedience and the Fall. The mid-point, however, lay in an act of God-made-man, for it consists in the expiation or atonement of Adam’s sin by the sacrifice of the Second Adam. The effect of that sacrifice was to restore human nature to some semblance of what it had been before the Fall.

For hundreds of years, Christians had used various metaphors to link the sequence Creation–Fall–Atonement, in patterns such as making–breaking–mending; birth–death–rebirth; and most important for us today, the final sequence: being clean–getting dirty–being washed clean.

Simplifying enormously (and omitting any reference to Predestination), in the view of the Christian Church, human beings of any race, at any point in time after the coming of Christ, can be ransomed or healed if they will freely avail themselves of God’s saving grace. This grace is normally channelled through the sacraments of the Church, the most important of the seven being Holy Communion—but the first, and the precondition of the others, being Baptism. (Below is Ghiberti’s panel for Siena).

The ‘making new’ is not instantaneous—it will not be complete until the eternity following the Last Judgement—but anyone who is baptised and ‘washed clean’, at the eight-sided font in the eight-sided Baptistery, is in fact ‘passing through a gate’ that will lead eventually to Paradise. Baptism, then, is the ‘Gate of Paradise’. But just as the life of individual Christians, in time after Christ, is already a foretaste of life eternal if they are in a state of grace, so, in one splendid exception to the general rule, life BC Christ offered a foretaste of life AD. God revealed his existence—and his purpose for mankind—to one people, freely chosen by him: the Jews. With them he made successive ‘treaties’ or ‘pacts’, or ‘covenants’: provided they would ‘do his commandments’ and ‘recognise no other god but him’, he would help them to win a ‘Promised Land’, a ‘new Eden’, and at the appointed time he would send them not simply another high priest or a prophet, but a Messiah, the ‘Anointed One’, the ‘Christ’.

Christians believed that the Jews had wilfully refused to recognise that Jesus of Nazareth was ‘the Christ’. But Christians also came to accept that God’s limited interventions in the history of the Jews had produced a whole series of correspondences between significant people, customs, and crucial events, a series in which the new order had been ‘foreshadowed’ or ‘anticipated’ in the old.

Some correspondences between institutions and rituals

BC	AD
Judaism Mosaic Law High Priest Blood Sacrifice Circumcision	Christianity Evangelical Law Pope Communion Baptism

When Christians studied the Jewish sacred books—significantly, they called them the Old Testament—they looked for such partial revelations: ‘prefigurations’, or, as they usually called them, ‘figures’ or ‘types’ of the Incarnation and the Redemption in Jewish history and Jewish religion. I remind you in the table above of a few key correspondences between people and observances; in particular, the relationship between blood sacrifices and the Eucharist, and between circumcision and Baptism. I remind you too, in the table below, that many historical events which took place in the years before Christ were also read as foreshadowings of other historical events—events not just in the life and Passion of Christ, but as recurring in the moral life of any individual Christian living in the ‘years of Our Lord’. The old Adam persists in time AD.

Some correspondences between

BC	AD
The History of the Jews Adam and Eve Cain and Abel Israelites and Golden Calf Abraham and Isaac Noah’s Ark Crossing the Red Sea, River Jordan Joshua and Jericho, David and Goliath Solomon and Sheba	The moral life of the Christian Temptation, Sin Envy, Hate, Violence Worship of False Values Obedience, Sacrifice Rescue from Sin Regeneration, Beginning a New Life Victory by God’s Grace Reconciliation

This persistence (‘original sin’, as it is traditionally called) leads to various successive ‘falls from grace’, analogous to those in Jewish history, which are hinted at in the first three lines of the table. But those who take the body and the blood of the Second Adam, having been ‘washed clean’ in the baptismal font, having gone through this door, will experience ‘newness of life’, ‘triumph over adversity’, ‘peace’ and ‘reconciliation’ with the God in whom they have ‘put their trust’. As I said, they have a foretaste of what it will be like in Paradise after the end of time.

This has been a long introduction to a lecture on Ghiberti, but the proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating—and I hope you will agree at the end by the end of the lecture that it is only by setting the doors back in this kind of intellectual context, that you can understand the choice of episodes, and see how the ten panels do indeed add up to a genuine cycle.

The first panel is placed top left on the Door. Remember that it is about two and a half feet square, and that you can never see it from the angle at which the photograph was taken, because it is about six to eight feet above your head. Remember, too, that the foreground figures are in deep relief, so that they present very different views as you move your position.

Its subject is the Beginning. First, the beginning of time, marked by the creative acts of God. These are three in number: the creation of the universe, alluded to in the flying figure of Jehovah at the centre of the concentric heavenly spheres, accompanied by the angelic host; then God’s creation of Adam; then his creation of Eve.

RIGHT [FIXME slide of first detail missing, placeholder reads Suitine 4 L5 Ghiberti 1993 R19; there is also a slide missing two subsequent, with the placeholder ‘to Ghiberti 1993 R20 S4 R13’]

Next comes the beginning of history, which consists in the first significant act by man (I remind you that in Hebrew, Adam means ‘man’)—that is, with the story of the Temptation and of the Fall, which is represented in the area in low relief on the left of the panel. The immediate consequence of the Fall is shown on the right, where the whole of mankind, in the persons of our common ancestors, is being driven out from the gate of Paradise.

In the creation of Adam, the Lord raises his right hand in the received gesture (half blessing, half command), while with his left hand, he helps Adam to rise to his feet. Adam himself, in a complex, almost awkward pose, flexes his left knee and pushes down with his right hand to show off the muscles in his shoulder, arm, and abdomen—for his body is intended to be not just beautiful, but manly.

In the centre of the panel, however (where he is shown again), his body becomes almost as sharp-edged as the rocks on which he lies sleeping, while Jehovah faces the other way now, and draws the figure of Eve from his side. Her body, very similar to Masolino’s Eve, is beautiful, feminine, smooth; and it has been given just the gentlest torsion to show off her small high breasts and the fullness of her thigh, with the illusion of roundness (in what is a fairly flat relief) enhanced by the way that the infant angels embrace her arms and waist.

You may be thinking that Ghiberti chose to place the creation of Eve in the centre of his composition simply for the pleasure of posing her lovely body in opposition to the bearded, draped form of Jehovah. It certainly does seem odd that the Temptation and the Fall (fig. 26) should be shown, on the left, in very flat relief, and only a few inches high. But the prominence given to the younger partner, Eve, the second created, is part of a conceptual pattern which we will find in the whole cycle. Christians have succeeded the Jews; and the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib was a recognised ‘prefiguration’ of the way in which the Christian Church issued from the Jewish Synagogue.

Before we leave the symbolism, notice the stream (it is not very prominent). It is one of the four streams in the Garden of Eden which were allegorised as ‘types’ or ‘figures’ of the River of Life, the fons vitae, that flowed in water and blood from Christ’s side to wash away the sins of the world. We should not be so carried away by symbolism, though, that we fail to enjoy the high drama of the Expulsion (fig. 27). Ghiberti’s angel fairly hurtles through the Gate of Paradise—his speed and direction being greatly reinforced by the descent of God and the angels:

Meanwhile, Adam and Eve seem to stagger and stumble, Adam being almost hidden behind his wife in her fig-leaf slip, who is now all too aware of her sexuality—her complex pose expressing not just guilt and shame, as in Masaccio’s interpretation of twenty years earlier, but fear, anger, and even defiance (something that we shall see echoed on the right of the next panel).

The layout of the next panel (top right), is in principle much more old-fashioned:

A narrow strip of foreground allows just enough room for two men and a pair of oxen. Behind them is a stylised rock formation, exactly like what one finds in Duccio, for example, a hundred years earlier:

The whole panel is breathtakingly lovely, considered either as a stylised mountain landscape, or as a surface pattern. To the left of the valley, Ghiberti chose to represent a state of humanity rather than any specific episode. This scene, then (fig. 31), shows Adam and Eve, with their children at their knees. Adam is resting from the toil that has given him the burly physique of a farm labourer, while Eve is spinning from the distaff: it is the time ‘when Adam delved and Evë span’. Although their accommodation is primitive, it is not without a certain idyllic charm, and I would say that this mood was sustained in the two figures below:

On the summit, we witness the first of many sacrifices; that is, attempts by man to make a peace offering. And we also see that, while God finds some sacrifices acceptable—Abel’s flame rises—he finds others unacceptable, for Cain’s does not. The younger, the weaker—the prefiguration of Christ and the Christians—is preferred. Notice too that the elder is filled with envy, resentment and hatred, as we shall see in many subsequent scenes, where the split between man and God leads to a division between man and man, and, in particular, to a rift between elder brother and younger brother.

So, in the next scene, still on the same panel, Cain swings his great club up high for what is clearly a second time—a superbly energetic pose—before bringing it down again on the cowering, defenceless Abel:

Giorgio Vasari commented ‘that the very bronze used for Abel’s limbs itself falls limp’. As I have said already, this scene looks forward to the crucifixion, and backwards to the expulsion—it is a second Fall. Cain raises his hand to God in a gesture of protest or defiance, which recalls that of his mother Eve; while behind him the stream of the River of Life flows past in vain.

The next scene lies to the left, underneath the scene of the creation:

It is dominated by built forms rather than a natural landscape, for behind the stonework of the altar and the woodwork of the hut—which is moulded in dramatic perspective and in very high relief, when seen from the ground—there appears not a mountain, nor a pyramid, as you might think, but Noah’s Ark, presented in that form. It is resting on Mount Ararat, and hence it rises to the very top of the surface.

Ghiberti has omitted the long story of the building of the Ark, the flood itself, and the sending out of the raven and the dove, which occupied the sixth and seventh chapters of Genesis. He takes up the story in Chapter 8, verse 15, when:

‘Noah went forth [from the Ark] and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him, and every beast…and every bird…went forth by families out of the Ark’.

So in front of the door, we see a group representing Noah, his wife, and the three sons and daughters-in-law, from whom the three main races of the world would descend:

High in the sky, we see the ‘fowls of the air’ flying away, while some of the more prominent animals make their way off into the mountains—an elephant, a deer, and a very ‘grisly’ bear. There is also in profile a lion and a lioness, who are looking hungrily at the ox—or gnu—who has been splendidly foreshortened from behind, to show off his rump steaks:

All these animals, incidentally, are perfect examples of how a fifteenth-century artist would use his collection of drawings to build up a commissioned picture, almost as a child might use a set of stencils.

Turning now to the foreground, it gives us two distinct scenes, the first of which follows on immediately in Chapter 8, verse 20.

It represents a very important stage, and a prefiguration, in the chain of events preparing the way for the Atonement. Noah, we read:

‘built an altar to the Lord and took of every clean animal…and offered burnt offerings on the altar. The Lord smelt the pleasing odour’.

As a result, the Lord made the Covenant with Noah and his descendants—described in Chapter 9 of Genesis—that ‘never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth’, and that the ‘sign’ of the covenant should be whenever God set the ‘rainbow in the cloud’. You can just make out that God is speaking from within a rainbow. It is not yet a promise to redeem mankind; but the ‘acceptable sacrifice’ of Noah has led at least to a promise not to destroy them utterly.

The other scene, however, on the left, belongs with those that tell of divisions between brothers, and of conflicts still to come.

In Chapter 9, verse 20, we read that:

‘Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine; and he became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent.…Ham saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside’.

By so doing he had clearly broken a taboo, for:

‘Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness’.

The upshot was that Noah laid a curse on Ham and his descendants; a curse that would be used as an excuse by the European descendants of Japheth to indulge in the slave trade of Africans well into the nineteenth century—but that is another story again.

The fourth panel, lying to the right, deals with Abraham and is similar in conception, in that Ghiberti again chooses not to represent a notorious example of divine vengeance—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra—but dwells rather on two important ‘prefigurations’ or steps towards the Atonement.

The scene on the left shows Abraham and Sarah, still childless as a couple, and already in their late nineties:

In a grammatically complicated passage, we are told that ‘the Lord’ (in the singular) ‘appeared to Abraham’; that ‘he beheld three men’, to whom he offered hospitality (this was regarded as a ‘type’ of the Eucharist); that Abraham addressed them as ‘my Lord’ (in the singular); and that they (in the plural) prophesied that ‘Sarah, your wife, shall have a son’. We also read that: ‘Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him’.

The three ‘men’ are shown with angels wings, as was customary in the iconographical tradition; but the normal theological interpretation of this encounter—with its strange shifts from plural to singular and back again—was that it represented the first appearance of the Trinity, the first revelation that God is Three as well as One. Despite her incredulity, Sarah will indeed bear a child, to be named Isaac. Ghiberti hence moves forward a number of years to the next scene, where Abraham has been ordered to make a sacrifice of his own son.

Having journeyed for three days, he leaves his two servants together with the ass at the foot of a mountain. This is what you see in the exquisite detail (fig. 43), with the foreshortened ass drinking from yet another life-giving stream, while the two servants are deep in conversation. Abraham then makes Isaac carry the wood for the sacrifice, concealing his intentions, by telling Isaac that God would ‘provide a lamb’. Here, one must simply read the words from Genesis:

‘When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him upon the altar, upon the wood.’

‘Then Abraham put forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said: “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said: “Here am I”. And he said: “Do not lay your hand on the lad…”’

The arm raised to kill is of course very different from that of Cain. Abraham’s sacrifice goes far beyond those of Abel or of Noah. He was willing to show obedience to the will of God by offering ‘his only begotten son’; and Isaac, who carried his own wood to the altar, was interpreted as a ‘type’ of Christ, who carried his own cross to Calvary. On the other hand, this prefiguration of the crucifixion falls well short of its fulfilment, because the Gate to Paradise would be reopened only when the son of God offered himself as a conscious victim.

With only one last glance (fig. 45) at the ascending rock formations, and the lovely trees—which may be thought to echo the tree of Knowledge, and to point forward to the tree of the Cross—we move forward eighty years in the biblical narrative, and from pictorial conventions that are still essentially medieval, to one of the most beautiful and celebrated examples of a Renaissance urban setting, drawn in accordance with Alberti’s rules for perspective.

The floor is duly marked out in paving stones, with orthogonals converging on a single vanishing point. The arcades are correctly foreshortened, and the architecture itself is classical in its aspirations, with rounded arches, and proper entablatures supported by pilasters with Corinthian capitals. The human figures are at last properly scaled, both to the architecture and in relation to their distance from the picture plane. Their eyes too are all at the same level, as Alberti knew they must be. Everything breathes proportion and harmony—which is just as well, because there are no fewer than seven different episodes taking place within the same frame.

The attendant women—one of Ghiberti’s most charming groups (fig. 47)—belong with the elderly lady, in her bedroom, in a scene that deliberately echoes pictorial conventions for the Birth of the Virgin and the Birth of John the Baptist. It shows us Isaac’s wife Rebecca, herself barren for many years (like Sarah before her, and Anne and Elizabeth after), who is being brought to bed of twin boys, Esau and Jacob. The twins’ appearance, you remember, was as different as their temperament, Esau being ‘hairy’ and ‘an hunter’, while Jacob was ‘smooth’ and ‘dwelt in tents’. You will remember too that their quarrels began even in the womb—as we are shown in the top right, which illustrates an earlier scene where Rebecca prays for help, and Jehovah appears in order to prophesy that ‘two nations are in your womb…divided…and the elder shall serve the younger’.

The scene in the middle, limited to the two small figures, illustrates the first recorded clash between the two brothers (25, 29ff.), when Esau, returning famished from a day’s hunting, agreed to sell his birthright for a ‘mess of pottage’. This act of folly was later understood as a ‘type’ of man’s rejection of God’s grace.

The four remaining episodes are all parts of the story in which Jacob cheats Esau of his father’s blessing as well—not a very edifying story, at first sight, but one which had a special significance for the ‘younger’ Christian community.

Isaac, his eyes now dim with old age, sent Esau ‘to hunt game…and prepare for me savoury food, such as I love, that I may eat and bless you before I die’.

In this very ‘medieval’ scene, Esau duly departs. Rebecca, meanwhile, has overheard. She told Jacob to kill ‘two good kids’ (you see him handing them over), and from their dark meat she prepares a ‘savoury dish’ tasting like game. She then puts the kids’ skins over Jacob’s smooth neck, in order to deceive blind Isaac’s hands, and in an agony of suspense, she watches while young Jacob receives his father’s blessing, a blessing which includes the words: ‘Be lord over your brothers,…nations shall bow down unto you’. These words should, by now, need no further commentary.

We pass from the fifth panel to the sixth, where we come on to another architectural setting:

This is such an absolute tour de force that it could still take Giorgio Vasari’s breath away one hundred years later, and it may have been inspired by a contemporary drawing of the ancient round church of St. Stephen in Rome.

This panel shows four scenes from the life of Joseph. Joseph, you remember, was Jacob’s son, born to his wife Rachel in her old age, and hated by—as you might well guess—his elder brothers. In the scene placed on top of the ‘mini-colosseum’—a very un-Renaissance scene—the brothers sell their father’s favourite to a group of passing Ishmaelite merchants, who take him and re-sell him into the land of Egypt. The price was twenty shekels of silver, and the episode was regarded as a prefiguration of Christ’s being sold for thirty pieces of silver.

That story is told in Genesis Chapter 38, and Ghiberti now leaps over four fascinating chapters to reach the point after the end of the seven years of plenty, which had been foretold by Joseph in his interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream. During those seven years, on Joseph’s orders, the Egyptians had stored grain in huge granaries, of which our rotunda is one. We have therefore come to the seven lean years, during which that grain would be distributed; and it is the work of distribution that occupies the middle ground, and the foreground to the right, where, in another marvellous group, we see Joseph himself supervising, a youth bracing himself to receive his sack, a mother turning away with a bundle on her head, while the little boy hugs just as much as he can carry. I have picked out this detail from two different angles, to give a sense of the complexity of the scene:

Among those who came for the ‘famine relief’ were Joseph’s elder brothers, who naturally failed to recognise Pharaoh’s chief minister. Joseph accused them of being spies—he seized Simeon as a hostage, and he demanded that they should come again with their ‘youngest brother’ as a proof of their good faith (Benjamin had been born after Joseph’s departure).

The brothers do indeed return with Benjamin, and are richly entertained, but Joseph gives orders that a silver cup should be hidden in their grain sacks, and he then has them arrested for stealing the cup. It is this moment which you see below: the officers, the cup in the sack, little Benjamin, and the brothers, who are ‘tearing their garments’ and protesting their innocence:

However, the story does not close with a grisly revenge, but with forgiveness and reconciliation: Joseph revealed himself, he forgave his penitent brothers, and ‘[he] fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept; and Benjamin wept upon his neck’ (fig. 55).

Apart from it being a scene of brothers reconciled, this is important historically as representing the moment when Jacob and his descendants—the ‘children of Jacob’, alias the ‘children of Israel’—were invited to settle in Egypt, where they would eventually be enslaved. This enslavement formed yet another well-known allegory of the soul’s bondage to original sin.

The seventh panel is less obviously fifteenth-century in style, and has many, presumably deliberate, echoes from earlier scenes: these include the water to the left, the trees and the tents, the mountain climbing towards the right with a Patriarch placed on the summit, and the appearance of Jehovah, wearing the same hat that he wore for the expulsion scene, accompanied once again by the angelic host. It is in fact a summation of all that has gone before.

The panel shows the day described in Exodus 19 and 20, on ‘the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone forth from the land of Egypt’. ‘Israel encamped before the mountain’ in the wilderness, Moses ascended the holy mountain of Sinai, and the Lord appeared to the accompaniment of ‘thunders and lightnings…and a very loud trumpet blast’, to give Moses the Tablets of the Law—the Ten Commandments.

This is therefore the single most important stage on the path to the Atonement. We now have a written law, replacing the informal pacts made between God, Noah and Abraham; a written law that would remain in place—accepted by Christ himself—until the proclamation of the new, evangelical law in the Sermon on the Mount, of which the scene is a ‘prefiguration’.

What we see in the right foreground—in a group even more agitated than that of Joseph’s brothers—are the people of Israel, who ‘stood afar off’, and ‘were afraid and trembled’ when ‘they perceived the thunderings and the lightnings and the sound of the trumpet’. In other words, like the conversation between Abraham’s servants, what you see here is not a distinct episode, but part of the scene above. Ghiberti, in fact, has limited himself to just one reference to all the many significant events that led up to the Exodus.

That reference is, of course, the all-important one—the crossing of the Red Sea, which was allegorised as a key prefiguration of the sacrament of Baptism.

It does not seem in doubt that this is the Red Sea, and that the figures presented here in close up (fig. 59, left) are indeed the women who in Chapter 15, ‘danced’, when ‘Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took the timbrel in her hand’ and sang to them a song of triumph. Confirmation comes from the fact that the figures in the frame flanking this panel (fig. 59, right) are unquestionably Miriam with her timbrel and her brother Aaron. The figure in armour, flanking the right-hand panel of the pair, is Joshua, Moses’s heir—but essentially a military man, as is clear from the image above.

The next panel on the right, shown above, is devoted to the many miracles that were channelled through Joshua, and which are narrated in the sixth book of the Old Testament, which is called quite simply the ‘Book of Joshua’.

We begin in Chapter 3, where our hero—pictured on his chariot, just in front of the left hill—orders the priests, who are carrying the sacred Ark of the Lord containing the Tablets of the Law, to cross the boundary of the Promised Land, which was formed by the River Jordan. The river was in flood at the time, but ‘when the feet of the priests bearing the Ark were dipped in the water…the waters coming down above stood and rose up in a heap far off…and all Israel pass[ed] over’ on dry ground.

Jesus himself would later be baptised in the Jordan, by John, the patron saint of Florence and of the Baptistery. It will thus be no surprise that the miraculous crossing over the Jordan was linked, typologically, to the crossing of the Red Sea, as another very important prefiguration of the sacrament of Baptism.

The scene in the right foreground, of which you see two details above, illustrates the chapter that follows. Joshua gave these orders:

‘Take twelve stones from out of the midst of the Jordan,
from the very place where the priest’s feet stood…
and lay them down in the place where you lodge tonight’.

Above them Ghiberti depicts ten of the twelve pavilions where the twelve tribes of Israel ‘lodged that night’. The last episode tells the famous story of the first miraculous victory of the invading Israelites over the indigenous population, when, in the words of the Negro spiritual, ‘Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down’.

This triumph was all ‘done by numbers’, you remember—for six days running, the whole army marched once round the walls of Jericho to the continued sound of trumpets. On the seventh day, seven priests, with seven trumpets, carried the Ark seven times around the walls, followed in silence by the army. After the seventh circuit (to return to the song): ‘Joshua told the people of Israel to shout, / and the walls came tumblin’ down’.

Despite such familiar features as tents and trees, and the two complex groups of figures across the foreground, the composition of this panel as a whole is very different from the higher panels, thanks both to the massive walls of the city of Jericho, which extend right across the top of the panel, and also to the second frieze of figures in front of the walls.

Ghiberti will not leave this without its visual counterpart, which is to be found immediately in the next panel, on the left of the bottom pair of the door, now more or less at eye level:

The city this time is Jerusalem, the commander is Saul (I Samuel 17, 37ff.), and what we see in the foreground is the scene where the shepherd boy David, as scantily dressed as Abel. Having struck down Goliath with one of the five stones he had taken from the brook, he takes the giant’s own sword and cuts off his head, while armed men—fully-grown men—look on in wonder and admiration.

In the tiny scene above—a reference back to the ‘daughters of Israel’ on the panel containing the Moses story—he carries Goliath’s head to Jerusalem, and is greeted with a hymn of praise: ‘Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands’. This scene was regarded as a prefiguration of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.

In the right foreground, the Israelites are routing the Philistine army, in a battle scene deriving from Roman battle reliefs like the one below:

This is certainly the most violent and animated of all the many figure groups we have seen so far, and so provides the maximum contrast to the final scene, which deals not with war but with reconciliation, and is the only panel to represent just one unified scene. It is the only one, too, where virtually all the figures are onlookers, concentrating motionless on the central event.

The architectural setting is almost perfectly symmetrical, representing the newly completed Temple of Jerusalem, constructed, here, in the form of a Christian basilica, with Gothic arches and Classical details (which one could interpret as yet another kind of ‘reconciliation’). Exactly in the centre of the architectural composition, framed by the arch of the nave and foreshortened centrally, in front of the altar (presumably containing the Ark and the Tablets which we saw earlier) we see the son of David, namely King Solomon.

He is bearded like the earlier patriarchs, whose authority he has inherited, and has just renewed Israel’s pact with Jehovah. He clasps the hand of the Queen of Sheba, who is dressed like Mary, and whose gesture of submission reflects her words at the end of her visit to King Solomon:

‘Behold, the half was not told me; your wisdom and prosperity surpass the report which I had heard…blessed be the Lord your God’.

The Queen’s words, the fact that she had journeyed from the East, and the fact that her gifts included spices and gold—these all led to her visit being interpreted as a prefiguration, a ‘type’, of the adoration of the Three Wise Men. This in turn had particular importance, since their act constituted the first recognition that the Jewish Messiah was to be the Saviour of all mankind—not just Jews, but also pagans, ‘gentiles’—including the Florentines, who would be baptised behind this door here:

LEFT [FIXME slide missing, placeholder reads ‘Porta del Paradiso Ghiberti end S4 L5’]

That is the main meaning. However, the hands which are clasped in reconciliation, coupled to the political context of the time, make it very probable that Ghiberti intended a reference to the attempt to reunite the Eastern and the Western churches, Catholic and Orthodox, in view of the threat from the Turks in the 1430s—attempts which culminated in a joint council of the churches, which transferred itself from the city of Ferrara to Florence in the year 1439.

I shall tell you more about that conference, and more about the Three Wise Men, in the next lecture, when we will follow them, as they followed their star, through Western Art: from mosaics in Ravenna, to manuscripts in England, to an altarpiece in Florence, and, finally, the walls of a chapel in the new palazzo which the Medici built for themselves in the 1440s.

FIXME: Also search for ** (as well as for “FIXME”)

**TOM

THANKS FOR YOUR COMMENT BELOW AND FOR EDITING THE PARAGRAPH. LET’S JUST LEAVE THEM WHERE THEY ARE FOR NOW.

THIS WAS A GOOD LECTURE AND YOU’VE DONE A VERY GOOD JOB.

– end main body (once again, rather abruptly); in the appended text to the original document there was a great deal that had been used, and improved upon, in the main body edited above; but also a long section on the innovations of humanism which I have edited below, but could not think of a way of inserting (as the lecture as stands has a different way of ‘getting to’ Ghiberti. There are also two further points on casting bronze, which could be added to the two in the current article –

TWO IMAGES CUED

I have stressed continuity, but there were also two very important new factors: the lucky chances of birth and survival that brought half a dozen artists of genius and originality together in the same city and in the same years; and the ever increasing, ever more whole-hearted admiration for the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. This permeated every sphere: in moral philosophy; in educational theory (leading to the renewal of the idea of man as a free citizen active in the affairs of a free state); in the purification of the Latin language from post-Classical words, constructions, and style; in the quest for new and better texts of ancient writers, in handwriting as well as orthography; in the renewed study of ancient sculpture and architecture, so evident in the pose of the statue and in the round arches and the columns of the façade. The initial phase of admiration and close study was now being succeeded by a phase of imitation, emulation and assimilation—for these were the years in which people began to use the metaphor of ‘rebirth’, which, much later, would harden into the concept of the ‘Renaissance’.

RIGHT

All the many strands of admiration and of emulation of the ancient world came together in the work of Leo Battista Alberti, author of comedies, satires and philosophical dialogues, as well as treatises on architecture, sculpture and painting. And there is no better guide to the aesthetics and aspirations of that period than his Della Pittura, ‘On Painting’, written in Latin in 1435, and translated into Italian by the author in the following year. Of all the many things it contains, there is time to mention only one—his formulation of the surprisingly simple rules of perspective with a single vanishing point, by which you can foreshorten architecture to produce the illusion, not just of a narrow stage set, but of a courtyard with a path leading to a gate, or a funnel-like street in which the church is a good hundred and fifty yards away, as you can see in the little panels by Domenico (FIXME ?) in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

–

Third, it’s vital to remember how much time was required. Even when the panel had been cast, it could take up to two years to clean and polish and gild a little panel like this. And, fourth, all importantly, Ghiberti worked in the first stage not by chipping away at hard stone, but by moulding soft wax; by building up, or drawing out; by adding not by taking away, always with the opportunity to make a hundred changes and corrections. Bronze is harder than stone, but it takes its form in the molten state. It favours the smooth and ductile effect of which Ghiberti was to become one of the great masters.