Later works and writings of Lorenzo Ghiberti

Following the completion of the first doors, Ghiberti embarked on a decade of intense exploration of new ways of forming pictorial space and making gracefully active and lifelike figures. His works of the late 1420s show him able to make space increasingly intelligible in a series of clearly receding planes; using shallow relief, Ghiberti depicted volumes of bodies and deep architectural spaces. Examples are the reliefs in Siena; the Dati Tomb (the bronze plaque for the floor tomb of the Dominican general Leonardo Dati); and the two shrines in Florence, Cassa di San Zenobius (a bronze casket with relief panels of stories from the saint’s life) and Shrine of SS. Protus, Hyacinth, and Nemesius (a bronze container for the relics of three martyrs). It is likely that at this time Ghiberti encountered Leon Battista Alberti, a young humanist scholar who, inspired by the new art in Florence, was composing theoretical treatises on the visual arts. Their mutual belief that beauty was synonymous with the conception they shared of antique art makes it difficult to know whether or not Alberti’s ideas in De pictura (On Painting) precede the three panels of the second door (Isaac, Joseph, and Solomon), which are the visual equivalent of those ideas. The beauty of antique art meant for both Alberti and Ghiberti an idealization of nature; capturing its essence meant revealing life by depicting movement, life’s most salient visible characteristic. For the representation of a realistic spatial setting for these naturalistic figures, Alberti’s treatise sets forth a perspective system for projecting such spaces onto the picture plane of a painting or bas-relief. Ghiberti’s three panels seem an embodiment of the humanist’s formulations for Renaissance pictorial art, and it is clear that any assessment of his art must account for the incorporation of the new theory as well as for the beauty and charm of these works. Ghiberti was himself so proud that he claimed to have made, in all 10 panels,

architectural settings in the relation with which the eye measures them, and real to such a degree that…one sees the figures which are near appear larger, and those that are far off smaller, as reality shows it.

Ghiberti’s writings, I Commentarii (probably completed about 1447), shed more light on his humanist interests.The commentaries are composed of three books. The first, a history of art in ancient times, is Ghiberti’s digest of writings of Latin authors on the subject; in it he reveals his belief that the inseparability of practice and theory is responsible for the excellence of ancient art. The second book records the art of the immediate past, and Ghiberti expresses his admiration for certain Sienese painters and for a late 14th-century northern goldsmith named Gusmin who is known only through Ghiberti’s pages; this book includes an autobiography, in which Ghiberti establishes his place in the history of art. The last book was apparently more theoretical, but in the surviving manuscript it is fragmentary. The commentaries demonstrate Ghiberti’s confidence in his position as an important leader in the Florentine Renaissance—one interested in recapturing the art of the ancients and studying it as a humanist scholar would, and one who developed a new style all’antica in which he freely created artworks with a grace and beauty that have been found winning since their invention.