Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll.
- Anna Brownell Jameson
- Date:
- 1899
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll. Source: Wellcome Collection.
90/335 page 54
![work begun with so much solemnity. But the great artist who had undertaken it was not hurried into carelessness by their impatience or his own ; nor did he contract to finish it, like a blacksmith’s job, in a given time. He set about it with all due gravity and consideration, yet, as he describes his own feelings in his own words, con grandissima diligenza e gran,- dissirno amove, “ with infinite diligence and infinite love.” He began his designs and models in 1402, and in twenty-two 1 years from that time, that is, in 1424, the door was finished and erected in its place. As in the first door Andrea Pisano had chosen for his theme the life of John the Baptist, the precursor of the Saviour, and the patron saint of the Baptistery, Lorenzo continued the history of the Bedemption in a series of subjects from the Anuunciation to the descent of the Holy Ghost; these he represented in twenty panels or compartments, ten on each of the folding-doors, and below these eight others containing the full-length effigies of the four evangelists and the four doctors of the Latin Church — grand, majestic figures; — and all around a border of rich ornaments, fruit, and foliage, and heads of the prophets and the sibyls intermingled, won- drous for the beauty of the design and excellence of the work- manship ; the whole was cast in bronze, and weighed thirty-four thousand pounds of metal. Such was the glory which this great work conferred not only on Lorenzo himself, but the whole city of Florence, that he was regarded as a public benefactor, and shortly afterwards the same company confided to him the execution of the third gate of the same edifice. The gate of Andrea Pisano, formerly the principal entrance, was removed to the side, and Lorenzo was desired to construct a central door which was to surpass the two lateral ones in beauty and richness. He chose this time the history of the Old Testament, the subjects being se- lected by Leonardo Bruni d’ Arezzo, chancellor of the republic, and represented by Ghiberti in ten compartments, each two and a half feet square, beginning with the Creation, and end- ing with the Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba ; and he inclosed the whole in an elaborate border or frame composed of intermingled fruits and foliage, and full-length figures of the heroes and prophets and prophetesses of the Old Testament, standing in niches, to the number of twenty-four, 1 [Perkins says twenty-one, giving 1403 for the date of the commission.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0090.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
