The Gates of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti Essay Example for Free

The Gates of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti Essay Dear , When this letter reaches your hand, I hope you’re in the best of health mentally and physically. As for myself I’m blessed and can’t complain. The baby is doing fine, albeit being a little under the weather. I have been studying and swamped with schoolwork, trying to complete all of my final assignments for this semester. I had to write and share with you my wonderful experience. After providing you with many exciting detail you are going to want to experience this for yourself. In a recent visit to Florence, Italy, I had the chance to visit the Museo dellOpera del Duomo, where a lot of masterpieces from great masters were on display. It would be too lengthy for me to describe them all to you, so Ill focus on one works of art that has caught my interest. This piece is called The Gates of Paradise, and was created by Lorenzo Ghiberti from 1425 to 1452, a period of twenty-seven years. Well, you may wonder why it took such a long time for that piece of art to be completed. As I have seen in the exhibition, the work was intricate, which obviously requires time to make. Ghiberti was born in 1378, whose father was an artist and a goldsmith. His sculptures were usually coated in bronze or gold, a skill he obviously learned from his father. Being an artist of the early Renaissance period, he was revered in his lifetime. Like other artists of his era, he showed artistic freedom and individualism in his work. During the Renaissance, artists were prone to portray figures imbibing the Greek ideals of perfection. Florence then, his birthplace, was the center of culture and politics in Europe, until the end of the seventeenth century. You have to understand that during this time, religious art was in vogue, funded by patrons such as the Medici family, who paid high commissions to sculptors and painters, encouraging artistic culture to flourish. Some scholars think that this religious fascination stemmed from the societys realization regarding life and death as a result of the Black plague that badly hit Florence in the late fourteenth century. Ghiberti won a competition in 1401, when he was twenty five, which made him famous. In this competition he made twenty-eight sets of panels, made in bronze, for the cathedral in Florence, where each panel depicted scenes from the New Testament. The work was completed in twenty-one years. After completing this work, he was commissioned to do another doorway for the church. This time, he made ten panels depicting scenes from the Old Testament. Being highly gifted in sculpting and metalworking, his works show vividness and durableness. The famous Michelangelo Buonarotti called the doorways, Gates of Paradise. In these panels, these scenes from the Old Testament include: The Creation of Eve, Noah and his family, Moses receiving the Law from God in Mt. Sinai, David beheads Goliath, The Creation, and The Fall and Banishment. The artist prepared the main panels using the wax casting process, a technique thats not used nowadays. The modeling of each panel was in wax, and then covered with plaster and clay jacket. After the panels were covered, Ghiberti baked the panels to melt the wax, leaving a mold for bronze to be poured. Once the bronze cooled off, the plaster and clay were removed. Then, each panel was cleaned and the finer details were worked on using metal tools. It took Ghiberti years to complete the fine details found in the panels. Once the main frames were complete, Ghiberti next worked on the fire-gilding method, which was dangerous for it involved a gold-mercury amalgam. The process involved applying the amalgam to each panel. Mercury fumes, which are toxic, dissolved in the air by heating, in order to leave the gold on the surfaces. In 1452, the completed doors were installed, and they stood for five centuries until World War II. During the Second World War, Nazi officials in Italy coveted the artworks found in Florence. They asked for the sculptures, paintings, and other works of art to be transferred and become part of their private collection. Fortunately, somebody thought of hiding the Gates of Paradise in a railway tunnel in the South of Florence. After the war, the doors were recovered and some artists made replicas. These replicas were sold to the Grace Cathedral after the liberation in 1944. The originals were placed in the 1980s in the Duomo museum for restoration and safekeeping after flooding in Florence destroyed some of the panels. Florence is not the city it once was during the Renaissance. Times have changed, and artistic culture has given way to industrialization and modernization. But Florence still remains a beautiful place with a rich history and a collection of thousands of arts from great masters who once lived and breathed in the city. Well, thats all I can share with you. Nothing compares to seeing the actual masterpieces in person. Hope you could come with me on my next Italian tour. Ciao! Sincerely. Reference The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghibertis Renaissance Masterpiece. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved December 4, 2007, from: http://www. metmuseum. org/special/gates_paradise/ghiberti_images. asp