Renaissance masterpiece by Lorenzo Ghiberti to open U.S. tour in Atlanta

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This article was published 26/10/2006 (7261 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ATLANTA (AP) – A few days after opening the first exhibit in a three-year partnership with the Louvre in Paris, the High Museum in Atlanta announced that it will be the first of three stops in the United States for an iconic masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance that has never left Florence.

Three panels from the eastern doors of the Baptistery, called “Gates of Paradise,” will be on view starting April 28.

“I tell my students the Baptistery is where Renaissance art was born, and these are the doors to the birthplace of the Renaissance,” said Gary Radke, a Syracuse University fine arts professor and exhibit curator.

The 10 bronze panels in the Baptistery eastern doors, created in low relief by Lorenzo Ghiberti in–25-1452, have been under restoration for more than 25 years, after being damaged by nearly 600 years of open-air exposure in Florence’s cathedral square as well as by the floods that engulfed much of the city in’66.

They depict pious scenes from the Old Testament. The three that will travel to Atlanta tell the stories of the creation of Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau, and David and Goliath.

But it’s the way Ghiberti made them human that heralded the ideals of the Renaissance, where man and his real experience in nature, not God and a world of stars and gold, was at the centre of art, Radke said.

Instead of stylized figures set against a flat background of medieval art, Ghiberti’s characters inhabit a real world seen through a scientifically correct perspective and square, window-like frames.

There are trees and mountains, simple huts and walled cities, and groups of figures that fade into the distance. The farthest images, like Eve spellbound by the serpent, are barely etched in the gilded bronze, while the ones closest to the viewer, such as God raising a muscular Adam, are sculpted almost in the round.

That last scene famously recurs in Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, completed in 1512. Michelangelo was a great admirer of Ghiberti’s doors, and said they truly were “doors to paradise” – because of their beauty, not only the Baptistery’s message of salvation.

Michelangelo also sculpted the best-known David, who became a symbol of underdog Florence as it established itself as a major capital in the 15th and 16th centuries.

In exchange for hosting the exhibit, the High Museum has made a “significant contribution” to the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the museum of the Florence cathedral, so it can restore an early Renaissance silver altar that was also inside the Baptistery, said Philip Verre, the High’s deputy director.

The Florence museum has collaborated with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a restoration laboratory also in Florence, to restore the panels in the three-tonne doors. Pollution, flooding, inadequate chemical cleanings and the difficulty of getting the panels out since they had been pressure-fitted into the frame all made for years of struggle, Radke said.

After Atlanta, the panels, accompanied by four figurines from the doors’ frame, will travel to the Art Institute in Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before returning to Florence, where they will be placed in the Florence cathedral museum. Since the’90s, copies have been installed in the Baptistery.

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High Museum: www.high.org

Museo di Santa Maria del Fiore: www.operaduomo.firenze.it

Opificio delle Pietre Dure: www.opificio.arti.beniculturali.it