The Gates of Paradise
Opera di Santa Maria Del Fiore
Florence Italy
2016

The Florence Baptistery, also known as the Baptistery of Saint John, is a religious building in Florence, Italy, and has the status of a minor basilica. The octagonal baptistery stands in both the Piazza del Duomo and the Piazza San Giovanni, across from Florence Cathedral and the Campanile di Giotto.

https://duomo.firenze.it/en/39/baptistry

https://www.florenceinferno.com/gates-of-paradise/

Famous golden doors of landmark Baptistery of St. John, with panels depicting Biblical scenes.

The Gates of Paradise is the main gate of the Baptistry of Florence (Battistero di San Giovanni), located in front of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.
The Porta del Paradiso, in Italian, was created by Florentine goldsmith and sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti between 1425 and 1452 and installed in the eastern portal of the Baptistery.
The Gates have been praised by generations of artists and art historians for their compelling portrayal of scenes from the Old Testament.
Over time, the seventeen-foot-tall, three-ton bronze doors became an icon of Renaissance, one of the most famous works of art in the world.
The workmanship of panels demonstrates that the Florentine artists had mastered linear perspective and the classical idiom by the early 15th century.
According to The Lives of the Artist by Giorgio Vasari, the door—once known just as the East Door—was named the Gates of Paradise by Michelangelo Buonarroti because of its striking beauty.

This wonderful door plays an important role in Dan Brown’s novel Inferno.

THE STORY OF THE DOOR
The first two doors of the Florence Baptistry were made by Andrea Pisano in the fourteenth century. These doors consist of twenty-eight quatrefoil panels, with the twenty top panels depicting scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist. The eight lower panels depict the eight virtues of hope, faith, charity, humility, fortitude, temperance, justice, and prudence.

For the third door—the north one—the city of Florence announced in 1401 a famous competition, in which both Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi participated.

Lorenzo Ghiberti won the competition.
The North bronze doors comprise twenty-eight panels, with twenty panels depicting the life of Christ from the New Testament. The eight lower panels show the four evangelists and the Church Fathers Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Gregory, and Saint Augustine.

Once Ghiberti completed the North door, he was given—unusually, with no competition—the task of also creating the East gate, which turned out to be the most beautiful.

The scenes that decorated the door had to depict the Old Testament, but Ghiberti had full freedom of interpretation.

Initially, the scheme was expected to be very similar to the other ports, with twenty-eight panels. The idea of creating something new happened during the course of work.

Ghiberti decided to reduce the number of panels to ten and also increase the size, choosing the new square shape.

Each wing of the Gates of Paradise contains five large rectangular reliefs of scenes from the Old Testament, from Creation to Solomon, between figurated borders containing statuettes in niches and medallions with busts.

The scenes from the Old Testament are as follows: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Esau, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, and Solomon and Sheba.

They are known for their vivid illusion of deep space in relief, which resulted from the construction of perspective based on a mathematical theory of the representation of three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional plane.

The doors are not only beautiful, but also a technical marvel.

Many of the sources for the scenes were written in ancient Greek, but knowledge of Greek at that time was not so common. Greek scholar Ambrogio Traversari was probably entrusted with the translation.

Through the Gate of Heaven, some episodes of the Bible were again told to the public for the first time after many centuries.

Construction lasted twenty-seven years. Only in 1452 did Ghiberti, now seventy years old, install the last bronze panels.

Over the years, a bevy of assistants and pupils helped Ghiberti, including some already well-known artists, such as Luca della Robbia, Donatello, Michelozzo, Benozzo Gozzoli, Bernardo Cennini, and Ghiberti’s sons, Vittore and Tommaso.

The door remained in place for centuries, well preserved, thanks to Ghiberti’s high quality of work.
The door was dismantled in 1943 because of the bombings of World War II and hidden in a gallery and went back to the Baptistry in 1948.
After the 1966 flood some panels were taken to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure to be repaired.
In 1990 the entire door was dismantled for total restoration and replaced with a copy.
BUILDING THE GATES OF PARADISE
During the Renaissance, bronze was far more costly than marble and posed significant technical difficulties in an age before industrial casting.
Ghiberti created the Gates of Paradise using a technique known as lost-wax casting.

After making drawings and sketch models in clay or wax, he prepared full-scale, detailed wax representations of every component of the reliefs. (Some scientists and scholars believe that he modeled his reliefs directly in wax; others propose that he designed an initial model in another material and then made an indirect wax cast.)

When Ghiberti and his assistants finished a model, they added wax rods in branching patterns to its back. The entire relief was then covered in a fire-resistant material like clay and heated until the wax melted out, leaving a hollow mold. The spaces that had been occupied by the rods served as sprues (channels) through which bronze reached the surface of the relief. The sprues were cut away from the reliefs after casting, but their remains are still visible on the back of each panel.

Ghiberti’s work was only half finished when he took the bronzes out of their molds. He still needed to complete the work of engraving (that is, hammering, carving, incising, and polishing the reliefs). Utilizing his training as a goldsmith, he directed his numerous assistants in cleaning and enhancing details on the surface of the metal.

Ghiberti used a bronze alloy that was very receptive to gilding. He mixed gold dust with mercury and painted the mixture across the front surface of each relief. Some of his brushstrokes are still visible, but, for the most part, he succeeded in creating a smooth, luminous surface that suggests air and atmosphere.
To make the gold adhere to the bronze, Ghiberti heated each relief to burn off the mercury, leaving only the gold in place.

This was a dangerous process that is no longer followed.