Ghiberti Quotes

A remarkably large number of Renaissance artists were illegitimate, including Alberti and Ghiberti. For them, as for Leonardo, this was both a curse and a blessing. Had he been born "legitimately," Leonardo would likely have followed in his father's footsteps and become a notary or a lawyer. But those professions' guilds refused entry to illegitimate children. Leonardo couldn't become a doctor or a pharmacist, nor could he attend university. By age thirteen, most doors were already closed to him.

Then we come to the works that appear in eight out of the nine art histories. They were Velazquez’s Las Meninas, one or another of the pages of the Limbourg brothers’ illuminations for Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise on the north baptistery door of the Florence cathedral, Edvard Munch’s Scream, and Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. All are important works, and at least two, Las Meninas and Gates of Paradise, attract extravagant praise in many art histories. The others are among the finest representatives of a movement or genre—but that’s why they are shown so often, not because anyone thought they belonged at the very apex of artistic greatness. Thus the first and obvious difference between a list of art works and the index of artists: Whatever quibbles one might have with the precise ordering of a list of great artists in the Western art inventory, all the people who are near the top belong somewhere near the top. The same cannot be said of all the works of art that are near the top. The ordering of Western artists has high face validity, whereas the ordering of works of Western art does not.

What can you do?” “Head one of the largest estates in England and vote in the House of Lords,” Jason replied. “And brush down a horse. What can you do?” “Write a paper on the difference between Brunelleschi’s and Ghiberti’s bronze work,” Winn quipped and then, after a thought, “and argue with the butcher.” “Well . . . we are two utterly useless people,” Jason surmised. “Except for the butcher.” “And the horses.

The fourteenth-century court artists of Ife made bronze sculptures using a complicated casting process lost to Europe since antiquity, and which was not rediscovered there until the Renaissance. Ife sculptures are equal to the works of Ghiberti or Donatello. From their precision and formal sumptuousness we can extrapolate the contours of a great monarchy, a network of sophisticated ateliers, and a cosmopolitan world of trade and knowledge. And it was not only Ife. All of West Africa was a cultural ferment. From the egalitarian government of the Igbo to the goldwork of the Ashanti courts, the brass sculpture of Benin, the military achievement of the Mandinka Empire and the musical virtuosi who praised those war heroes, this was a region of the world too deeply invested in art and life to simply be reduced to a caricature of “watching the conquerors arrive.” We know better now. We know it with a stack of corroborating scholarship and we know it implicitly, so that even making a list of the accomplishments feels faintly tedious, and is helpful mainly as a counter to Eurocentrism. There

Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and discovered that replicas of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise

Manetti was influenced by his readings of the ancients, generously citing in his defense authors such as Cicero as well as Aristotle. But he was clearly inspired, too, by his home city of Florence. God had created the world in six days, but since then humanity was responsible for discovering and adorning it. He used the frescoes of Giotto (“the best painter of his time”), the cupola of Brunelleschi (“the greatest architect of our age”), and the cast-bronze baptistery doors of Lorenzo Ghiberti (“the preeminent sculptor of our day”) as evidence not only of pleasurable sights but of the divinity of the human mind—the excellence to which humanity, at its best, could rise. He concluded with a resounding endorsement of humanity as having “a nature and a destiny of dignity and excellence.” Life on earth was to be celebrated and enjoyed, not disdained and grimly endured in hopes of its sole bonus, relief and respite in the afterlife.

Ghiberti’s

Filippo Brunelleschi, the great Renaissance artist and architect, was a great practitioner of the art of making others come to him as a sign of his power. On one occasion he had been engaged to repair the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence. The commission was important and prestigious. But when the city officials hired a second man, Lorenzo Ghiberti, to work with Brunelleschi, the great artist brooded in secret. He knew that Ghiberti had gotten the job through his connections, and that he would do none of the work and get half the credit. At a critical moment of the construction, then, Brunelleschi suddenly developed a mysterious illness. He had to stop work, but pointed out to city officials that they had hired Ghiberti, who should have been able to continue the work on his own. Soon it became clear that Ghiberti was useless and the officials came begging to Brunelleschi. He ignored them, insisting that Ghiberti should finish the project, until finally they realized the problem: They fired Ghiberti. By some miracle, Brunelleschi recovered within days. He did not have to throw a tantrum or make a fool of himself; he simply practiced the art of “making others come to you.