The Gates of Paradise: Morenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece

This book, actually the catelog for an exhibit of 3 of the panels, tells you everything you want to know about the panels and the doors that are one of the signature achievements of the Renaissance. It's got well written chapters on the narratives in each panel and a detailed step-by-step description of how they were made, with beautiful diagrams. A must read if you're going to see the panels or doors...

"The Gates of Paradise" is the title Michaelangelo gave to the extraordinary bronze doors on the Baptistery in Florence created by Lorenzo Ghiberti in the mid-1400's. This book is not a "coffee-table book" for impressing friends, but is for lovers of great art or the Italian Renaissance who want to look at beautiful photos of these doors (recently restored after years of painstaking work), and to learn more about them in a serious way. The book is a collection of essays, each focusing on a different aspect of the doors; their origin (questions of authenticity, date of the work, the extent that Ghiberti [and not his apprentices] were involved; the technical aspects of casting, and then gilding, bronze in the 15th century (how Ghiberti was truly at the leading edge of his time, not just in artistry, but in technology); the difficulty and technical aspects of restoration; and more. I found this book fascinating and would recommend it highly.

This is the luxuriously published catalogue on the occasion of the exhibition "The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece", till January 13, 2008 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after having been on show at Atlanta's High Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. It's about the gilded bronze reliefs on the East Doors of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence (Italy), made by the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti between 1425 and 1452. The book contains seperate quires with photographs, mostly in detail, of the three reliefs on show: the "Adam and Eve" relief, the "Jacob and Esau" relief, and the "David and Goliath" relief, which allow the spectator to see what great masterpiece indeed Ghiberti made in his reliefs, depicting intricate scenes from the Old Testament. And these photographs do capture --since but few people will be so lucky as to see these reliefs in reality-- Ghiberti's artistry and amazing craft: his originality of invention, his majesty of designs, his vivid illusion and clarity of space as well as the diversity, intensity, and meticulousness in his depiction of the figures' physical, mental, and emotional states of mind, the aforementioned being a new realm of representation in Renaissance art. For all the expressive power and convincing vitality of human figures in early Renaissance art and their seeming to be intensely alive, only rarely are their individual and distinct states of mind and sentiment indicated if not captured the way Ghiberti managed to achieve. The book contains very readable essays on the artist Ghiberti and on the art and innovation in his amazing reliefs. In his essay, Andrew Butterfield offers scholars and students who still put their trust in Richard Krautheimer's 1956 book on Ghiberti (the 1970 hardcover and the 1983 paperback editions are still available) convincing arguments --based on the latest research-- to question Krautheimer's methods and results (in despite of their overall importance) which are largely based on Krautheimer's basic principal of the "single-point perspective". Mr. Butterfield argues that "single-point perspective" is a system intended for the projection of space on a two-dimensional surface, whereas relief sculptures are three-dimensional and have complex surfaces. It's a basic problem that figures in a relief must have real three-dimensional volume, and consequently there must be a projection at the bottom of a relief for these figures to stand on. This being rather self-evident for us now, Mr. Butterfield pursues his point by explaining the requirements of narrative and setting that Ghiberti faced, and fulfilled, among them the direct confrontation of but a few (usually two) figures in one scene of a relief, against the necessary depiction of large groups of figures in events in the biblical history of a nation or people in another scene of the same relief. All this is connected with Ghiberti's other primary concerns: legibili