The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece (High Museum of Art Series) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

The book is excellent. Each chapter is written by a different person with his or her own area of expertise. Somewhat redundant comments at the beginning of some chapters recounting the history of the doors but overall each chapter is very good. Image quality is good and text is readily understood by the average person . . not an overly technical book and is thus good reading. However, the format of the book is absolutely stupid. Who would create a book illustrating SQUARE panels such as these and then print it in a tall rectangular format. Someone wasn't thinking and it leaves the reader longing for a full page image of each panel in its entirety. All we get are vertical slices of panels and no complete image of any of them. One of the silliest mistakes in a book I have seen. Also some pages are not numbered and the numerous notes at the end of each chapter can have you jumping back and forth a bit. We went to the exhibition in Seattle and the book was a great background read. Shortcomings aside it is well worth buying. Enjoy it! By the way I have not yet purchased the other book available here at Amazon but may yet do so.

This is the luxuriously published catalogue on the occasion of the exhibition "The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece", till January 13, 2008 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after having been on show at Atlanta's High Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. It's about the gilded bronze reliefs on the East Doors of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence (Italy), made by the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti between 1425 and 1452. The book contains seperate quires with photographs, mostly in detail, of the three reliefs on show: the "Adam and Eve" relief, the "Jacob and Esau" relief, and the "David and Goliath" relief, which allow the spectator to see what great masterpiece indeed Ghiberti made in his reliefs, depicting intricate scenes from the Old Testament. And these photographs do capture --since but few people will be so lucky as to see these reliefs in reality-- Ghiberti's artistry and amazing craft: his originality of invention, his majesty of designs, his vivid illusion and clarity of space as well as the diversity, intensity, and meticulousness in his depiction of the figures' physical, mental, and emotional states of mind, the aforementioned being a new realm of representation in Renaissance art. For all the expressive power and convincing vitality of human figures in early Renaissance art and their seeming to be intensely alive, only rarely are their individual and distinct states of mind and sentiment indicated if not captured the way Ghiberti managed to achieve.
The book contains very readable essays on the artist Ghiberti and on the art and innovation in his amazing reliefs. In his essay, Andrew Butterfield offers scholars and students who still put their trust in Richard Krautheimer's 1956 book on Ghiberti (the 1970 hardcover and the 1983 paperback editions are still available) convincing arguments --based on the latest research-- to question Krautheimer's methods and results (in despite of their overall importance) which are largely based on Krautheimer's basic principal of the "single-point perspective". Mr. Butterfield argues that "single-point perspective" is a system intended for the projection of space on a two-dimensional surface, whereas relief sculptures are three-dimensional and have complex surfaces. It's a basic problem that figures in a relief must have real three-dimensional volume, and consequently there must be a projection at the bottom of a relief for these figures to stand on. This being rather self-evident for us now, Mr. Butterfield pursues his point by explaining the requirements of narrative and setting that Ghiberti faced, and fulfilled, among them the direct confrontation of but a few (usually two) figures in one scene of a relief, against the necessary depiction of large groups of figures in events in the biblical history of a nation or people in another scene of the same relief. All this is connected with Ghiberti's other primary concerns: legibility and a desire for clarity. Which stresses the need to look beyond the prejudicial notion that Ghiberti was in essence a Gothic and conservative artist, as advocated a.o. by J. Pope-Hennessy ("Italian Gothic Sculpture", 1986).
Gary M. Radke's essay explores the realms of collaboration Ghiberti had to enter into and looked for. In his days, most public commissions knew a high amount of interaction and Ghiberti had manipulative relations with his patrons, at the same time furthering his own best interests. Furthermore, this book explores historical documentation on the Gates of Paradise, reconsiders the creative sequence of Ghiberti's doors, documents the now almost finished restauration and examines both Ghiberti's art of chasing and casting technique of the Gates of Paradise reliefs, abundantly supplied with photographs and illustrations giving overviews and many details of each relief under survey. There also is a chronology of Ghiberti's life. See "The New York Review of Books", Vol. LIV, Nr. 17, November 8, 2007 for a more professional review of this catalogue.

"The Gates of Paradise" is the title Michaelangelo gave to the extraordinary bronze doors on the Baptistery in Florence created by Lorenzo Ghiberti in the mid-1400's. This book is not a "coffee-table book" for impressing friends, but is for lovers of great art or the Italian Renaissance who want to look at beautiful photos of these doors (recently restored after years of painstaking work), and to learn more about them in a serious way. The book is a collection of essays, each focusing on a different aspect of the doors; their origin (questions of authenticity, date of the work, the extent that Ghiberti [and not his apprentices] were involved; the technical aspects of casting, and then gilding, bronze in the 15th century (how Ghiberti was truly at the leading edge of his time, not just in artistry, but in technology); the difficulty and technical aspects of restoration; and more. I found this book fascinating and would recommend it highly.