Seattle Museum Exhibits Italian Renaissance

The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece is comprised of three original panels and four sculptures, two before restoration and two after. This exhibition marks the first time that the panels have ever traveled to the United States since their creation over 550 years ago. The exhibition opened at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and will subsequently travel to the Art Institute of Chicago from July 28 to October 13, 2007, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from October 30 to January 13, 2008.

The panels have been praised by generations of artists and art historians for their compelling portrayal of scenes from the Old Testament. Created in the mid-15th century and installed in the eastern portal of the Florentine Baptistery, it is said that the Gates of Paradise earned their nickname from Michelangelo, who greatly admired Ghiberti’s craftsmanship and artistic skill. In the 16th century Vasari called them the ‘finest masterpiece ever created, either in ancient or modern times.’

The exhibition will be on view at SAM during the same time as Roman Art from the Louvre (February 21 - May 11, 2008), a monumental exhibition of the Louvre’s Roman masterworks. “What a great opportunity for our community to see in Seattle supreme examples of Roman and Renaissance art. The original panels from Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise will never travel again,” said Mimi Gates, SAM Director. “The new expansion of SAM makes it possible for us to work with world-class museums and show multiple exhibitions of international significance. This is a once-in-a lifetime opportunity.”

The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece was organized by the High Museum of Art in collaboration with the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, Italy. The show was curated by Gary M. Radke, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University and Consulting Curator of Italian Art at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

“These brilliantly gilded bronze doors became an icon of Renaissance art and a touchstone of civic and religious life in Florence,” said Chiyo Ishikawa, SAM’s Deputy Director of Art and Curator of European Painting and Sculpture. “Ghiberti’s panels inaugurated a new approach to architectural space and sculptural relief, and exerted a profound and wide-reaching influence on Florentine art for centuries.”

On view will be three panels from the left door of the Gates depicting stories of Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau, and Saul and David as well as two prophets and two idealized heads from the doors’ intricate frame. The exhibition also highlights Ghiberti's creation of the monumental doors and reveals important new findings made during their 25-year restoration including new insights into the fabrication process and the evolution of Ghiberti’s imagery and techniques.

Restoration of the Doors

The Gates of Paradise exhibition will present the panels within the context of their 25 years of restoration, nearly as long as it took Ghiberti to create the work. After 500 years of exposure to weather and pollution, use and human contact, which included applying plaster directly to the doors to make molds and “restoring” them without benefit of modern scientific techniques, the Gates of Paradise were damaged—their surfaces corroded and gilt finish dulled. During the restoration, researchers made major new discoveries about the craftsmanship and history of the doors, including the confirmation of several previously untested assumptions and the revelation of new information, such as:

• The massive door frames, whose fronts and backs were previously thought to have been cast separately, were each cast in a single piece, providing an extraordinary framework for the work’s ten panels and 48 frame reliefs. • Tiny faces, arms, and legs were discovered on the door frames. New research shows that these marks were made by tools that the noted Florentine sculptors Michelozzo Michelozzi and Bernardo Cennini designed for coins produced at the Florentine mint. • Ghiberti cast the panels in a distinctive bronze alloy that lent itself to meticulous finishing and gilding. • Ghiberti created dozens of unique tools to finish and detail the figures and backgrounds of the reliefs after they were cast. The newly restored panels allowed researchers to examine every mark and design detail in order to identify each tool that Ghiberti used on the fabrication of the doors. • The workmanship and bronze shims used to install the panels in the matrix of the framework were so precise and tight that it took over five years of continuous work for specialists to remove four of the panels and eight frieze elements.

Lorenzo Ghiberti and the Gates of Paradise A goldsmith, sculptor, architect and writer, Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) earned his first major commission after winning a design competition in 1401-02 for what are now the northern doors of the Florentine Baptistery. The prestigious competition attracted some of the finest artists in Tuscany, among them Jacopo della Quercia and Filippo Brunelleschi. Each artist was required to submit a panel representing Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac. Ghiberti’s dramatic, technically superior interpretation of the moment of divine deliverance was influenced by a wakening awareness of classical sources.

After completing the first set of doors in 1424, Ghiberti immediately received the commission for another set: this time without a competition. Using the lost wax technique, Ghiberti cast the doors in bronze and then gilded the entire surface of the reliefs to create various pictorial effects and emphasize perspective. The ten reliefs contain a range of figures, some nearly in the round extending outward from the panel, some seemingly engraved in the surface in extremely low relief. Instead of framing the scenes within gothic quatrefoils—as in his earlier doors—Ghiberti developed large, rectangular “window frames” for his reliefs, thereby increasing the compositional space and the possibilities of illusionism. The Gates of Paradise also demonstrate the influence of classical sculpture on Renaissance sculpture with more realistic figuration, drapery, and compositions.

The three panels selected for The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece depict the stories of Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau, and Saul and David, giving viewers a coherent vision of Ghiberti’s work and his development as an artist. The changing styles and surface structure of the reliefs indicate how Ghiberti developed as an artist over the years that he worked on the Gates and how he continued to experiment with novel modes of representation. -- www.seattleartmuseum.org