Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise

In 1425, shortly after completing the second set of bronze doors for Florence’s baptistery, Ghiberti received a commission for the third and final set. Originally, these doors, like the two earlier sets, were intended to include twenty-eight panels; however, in the early stages of the commission the number was reduced to ten. They depict Old Testament stories, with statuettes of individual prophets and sibyls placed in the frames of each door. Instead of the quatrefoil frames used for his first doors, Ghiberti used a new square format for these reliefs. Ghiberti’s second set of doors was completely gilded, unlike the reliefs for his first doors in which only the raised surfaces were gilded.

It took Ghiberti twenty-seven years to complete these doors. When they were finished, their extraordinary splendor won them pride of place on the east side of the baptistery, facing the cathedral; his original doors for that site were moved to the north side of the building. The space between the Florentine baptistery and the cathedral was known in Italian as the paradiso because of its use as a cemetery during the late Middle Ages, giving Ghiberti’s doors the name by which they are usually known, the Gates of Paradise.

Each panel of the Gates of Paradise depicts several episodes of a biblical narrative. A recent rereading of Ghiberti’s panel depicting the story of Isaac’s rival sons Jacob and Esau demonstrates the artist’s skill as a master narrator.

To the left of the center foreground Isaac inquires why his elder son Esau, identifiable by his hunting dogs, is asking for a blessing. Neither father nor son yet realize what has taken place at the far right of the relief, where the younger Jacob, following the suggestion of his mother Rebecca, fooled his aging and near-blind father into pre-emptively giving him the blessing destined for his older brother. Rather like a flashback, Ghiberti strategically positions an even earlier event inside the central hall. There Jacob offers a bowls of soup to a famished and naïve Esau in exchange for the birthright.

The relief deriving from Donatello’s predella and the single-point perspective system allow the space in this panel to recede illusionistically, the figures becoming flatter as well as smaller as they move into the distance. The grouping of figures also helps to create a sense of space as the four women at the left pose dance-like in a circle and as Esau moves diagonally toward his father and into the space of the relief at the center foreground. At the same time, the figures of the woman at the left and of Rebecca at the right spill out over the frame, suggesting continuity between the space outside the frame and space inside it.^[1]