The Gates of Paradise

The test is subtractive, panel by panel and then across the doors. The ten fields run from the Creation to Solomon as a line through sacred history, and none could go without a gap in it: the Fall, the fratricide, the Flood and the covenant, the sacrifice of Abraham, the brothers’ blessing, Joseph’s forgiveness, the Law, the conquest, the king and the temple. The ten squares themselves replace the twenty-eight small fields of the earlier doors, and that choice is the argument for necessity: fewer and larger, so that each can hold a world. What yields is inside the panels. Several compress three to six episodes into one field, Adam and Eve, Joseph, Joshua, and in the crowds of the later panels some groups could be lost without loss of meaning. The frame is a second programme the narrative does not require. Required in its line, permitted in its fill.

Score: 8.4 / 10

What the doors bring into the open: sacred history as something that happened in a measured world, to people with weight and grace, under the same light and in the same kind of space as Florence. The Jacob and Esau panel sets the blessing and the deceit inside a loggia drawn to one vanishing point, so that the turning point of a family is shown as a civic event in a rational room. That holds: the human figure belongs to an ordered world, and the sacred story is a human story. It is the lowest of the twelve because the meaning is mostly that of the texts and the programme, told with great clarity rather than uncovered: what the doors disclose of Cain, Abraham or Joseph is what Genesis says, made beautiful. The hard places, the murder and the knife over Isaac, are composed, not felt through. The grace of the telling outweighs the edge of the reading.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The elevation is of one register, beauty and wonder, and it recurs across all ten fields and the whole gold surface. Its highest places: the Creation of Eve, the figure drawn out of Adam’s side and lifted by angels in a cloud; Jacob and Esau, the arcade receding behind the figures in a light that seems to belong to the metal itself; Solomon, the hall rising over the crowd to the meeting at its centre. The doors as a whole, two gold planes at the threshold of the baptistery facing the cathedral, are themselves a height, and accounts across five centuries report it. What holds the figure is range: almost no terror, no dread, little grandeur by scale. Even the Flood and the fall of Jericho are rendered with poise rather than force. High beauty, often, in one temperature, above Donatello’s David at 8.3.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The archetypes are the oldest: the garden and the expulsion, the brother killed, the flood and the ark, the father ordered to kill his son, the stolen blessing, the brother sold and forgiven, the law from the mountain, the walls that fall, the boy against the giant, the wise king. They are evoked by the texts and built by the doors in one respect. The line runs from Paradise lost to the temple of Solomon on the door through which the baptized enter, so that the threshold itself becomes the turn from fall to redemption, and the doors are at once a door and a figure of the way back to the garden. That construction bears the work’s meaning as a gate. The particulars stay particular: a goat in Abel’s flock, a camel, a basket, a wellhead. Held at the gate rather than above it because the doors arrange the archetypes more than they find new depth in any one of them.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is the Gothic bronze door: Andrea Pisano’s south doors and Ghiberti’s own north doors, twenty-eight quatrefoil fields, figures on a plain ground, the gilding on the figures only. The departure: ten large squares; a whole field of gilded ground; landscape and architecture built in one-point perspective inside bronze; relief graded from nearly free-standing figures in the front plane to lines barely raised in the distance, so that the metal holds depth like a painting. That turned the bronze door into a pictorial field, in the most prestigious commission in the city, and the stake was real: twenty-seven years, the guild’s money, the first master’s name. Held at the gate because the means were not his alone. Donatello’s low relief, Brunelleschi’s perspective and Masaccio’s space were in the air of the 1420s, and the grace of the figures keeps much of the International Gothic.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Substitute a different form and much of what the doors know goes. The graded relief is the instrument: figures in the foreground lean almost out of the field into the viewer’s space, the middle ground recedes in lower relief, the far architecture is drawn in the metal, so that each panel is a continuum from our world into the depth of the story, and that continuum is the claim that sacred history stands in the viewer’s own space. Gold carries a second meaning: the light of the field is not a sky but the metal, and the whole surface reads as radiance at the door of the sacrament. As a painting the passage from body to drawing would be lost; as sculpture in the round, the space. The doors are a door, and the form is the entry. Held below the top because the multi-episode panels use the form as a container in places, and the frame sits beside the narrative more than inside it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence over promise: nearly six centuries of attention and an unbroken literature, from Ghiberti’s own account in his Commentarii and Vasari’s life to the modern iconographic and technical studies. The open questions are real and have not closed: who wrote the programme and what it argues, whether a typology of Christ and the Church or a civic argument for Florence; how Ghiberti came to perspective and how far he follows Alberti’s treatise of 1435; what the dating of each panel shows of his change in style; how the frame figures are to be identified. The restoration opened a second field of yield, the making itself. Held below the top because the questions turn mostly on programme and attribution rather than on depths of meaning in the images. Below Donatello’s David and The Holy Trinity, both at 8.9 here.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is Florentine and Italian sculpture of the second quarter of the fifteenth century. The intrinsic force: the doors made the narrative relief a pictorial space and brought perspective, landscape and the antique figure into the most public work of bronze in the city; they are the high point of the Renaissance narrative relief and set its terms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: later Florentine relief and the crowded narratives of the Quattrocento painters stand in their line; Michelangelo’s praise, reported by Vasari, fixed them as a touchstone; Rodin’s Gates of Hell, from 1880, answers them as a portal of bronze narrative; casts stand on and in buildings across the world. Held below the top because the decisive steps in the field were made beside them, by Donatello and Masaccio, whose David and Holy Trinity stand at 9.2 here, and the doors were in part a summation, conservative in their grace by the time they were hung.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at nearly six centuries. Form: whole. All ten panels, the frame and its heads survive, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: in view on the building from 1452 to the late twentieth century, among the most looked at doors in Europe, and now in the cathedral’s museum. Fabric: here the charges fall. The flood of 4 November 1966 tore panels from the doors; centuries of exposure dulled and encrusted the gilding; the doors were taken from the building for conservation, and what stands on the baptistery now is a cast, so the work no longer serves as the door it was made to be. The restoration completed in 2012 recovered the gold. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Inside the row for centuries with form whole, in its lower part, level with Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene, which the same flood reached.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Command of cast, chased and gilded bronze at monumental scale, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and it is the highest of the twelve. The making bears load: each panel was cast, by all accounts, as a single plate with its relief, an exceptional feat of the founder’s art, then worked by hand for years, so that hair, foliage, drapery, stone and water are distinguished in metal. The relief is graded across many planes in a few centimetres of depth, and the perspective of the loggia in Jacob and Esau and of the hall of Solomon holds. Fire gilding over the whole field unifies the surface. The figures carry weight, turn and move, and the frame’s small heads are portraits. The costs: in the earlier panels the episodes are scattered and the space less unified; in the later, crowds are stacked rather than placed. Above Donatello’s David at 9.3; below Las Meninas at 9.8, whose making is its subject.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Creation, Adam lifted from the earth in an unbounded field, and Solomon, a symmetrical crowd under an architecture drawn to one point. One law holds them: every story stands on the same gold ground, in the same graded relief, with the same canon of graceful figures, so that cosmos and court obey one light and one metal. The frame binds the ten into one surface, and the range is wide, from the creation of the world to the state, from wilderness to city. But the law is not uniform. The doors record a style changing over twenty-seven years, and the scattered multi-episode fields of the first panels and the unified stages of the later ones are two systems of space, held together by metal and canon rather than by one construction.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The orders held: the sacred and the natural order, in the Creation, the Flood and the covenant; the family at its worst and its best, in Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers; labour, in the plough and the flock, Noah’s vineyard, the building of the ark; law, in Moses; war and the state, in Joshua, David and Solomon; the city and its architecture; and the makers themselves, in the self-portrait heads on the frame. They are integrated by the line of history from garden to temple and by the threshold at which the doors stand. What holds the axis is consciousness: the figures act and gesture, but no inner life is held, and the history told is the world’s, not a person’s. For a work of visual art the reach is very wide, above Las Meninas at 8.2; the figure describes what one portal can hold.

Score: 8.3 / 10