The Atelier Studio Program of Fine Arts

Art, Civic Identity, and the Making of the Gates of Paradise

The fifty years Ghiberti spent forging the Baptistery doors stand as a testament to the love and devotion he felt for Florence, where civic pride found its truest expression in the patient beautification of the city itself. This lecture considers the moment the craftsman became an intellectual, witnessed in two self-portraits Ghiberti set into the Baptistery doors of Florence. In the first, the young Ghiberti presents himself as a man of the workshop, the turban of a goldsmith shielding him from dust, heat, and noise, while in his later portrait he appears as a thinker who had mastered perspective and his knowledge of classical antiquity, as reflected in his reliefs.