Heaven Sent
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

If, for whatever reasons, you have been putting off a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this season, you have officially run out of rational excuses. There are great exhibitions at other venues, including the Jewish Museum’s “Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City & Country,” the Asia Society’s “The Arts of Kashmir,” and MoMA’s sublime show of Seurat’s drawings, but right now the Met is the New York destination spot. Currently, the museum offers extraordinary, temporary exhibitions of Baroque tapestries, 17th-century Dutch paintings, Abstract Expressionism, African reliquaries, and Egyptian metal statuary. And this is the short list. Now, the Met has also mounted the small, but glorious show, “The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece.”
Organized by James David Draper and Henry Kravis, the exhibition offers viewers the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get up-close-and-personal with some of the sculptures from the east-portal doors of the Florence Baptistery of San Giovanni, one of the greatest artworks of the Italian Renaissance.
The Florence Baptistery, which goes back to the 11th century, has three astounding sets of gilded bronze, relief-covered doors. Between 1330 and 1336, Andrea Pisano, perhaps after designs by Giotto, executed the first (or south) set, which consists of 28 quatrefoil panels depicting scenes from the life of John the Baptist and figures of the Virtues. Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), in competition with, among other artists, the masterful Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi, was awarded the commission for the second (or north) set of doors. He was barely 20 years old. Begun in 1404, and following Andrea’s International Gothic quatrefoil scheme, they depict scenes from the Christian Bible, with the Evangelists and Doctors of the Church. In 1425, after the completion of the north doors, Ghiberti and his substantial workshop began work on the third and final (or east) doors — “The Gates of Paradise.” Installed after 27 years of continual work, in 1452, they complete the biblical cycle with 10 panels (narratives comprising multiple scenes) from the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to the meeting of Solomon and Sheba.
An object lesson, the three doors illustrate the movement to Renaissance from High Gothic; and the Baptistery’s first two doors are extraordinary. For the north doors, Ghiberti sculpted the first Renaissance nudes — beings who are classical, confident, graceful, spiritual, and naturalistic. He also gave his figures individual human emotions, especially in their facial expressions and in their eyes. But the east doors are in a class by themselves.
Seventeen-feet-high and in gleaming gold and bronze, they open on the paradiso, the Italian term for the area between a baptistery and the entrance to its cathedral. They abandon the quatrefoil frame; incorporate, and take freedom with, Alberti’s system of one-point perspective; and (borrowing from the innovations of Donatello, who was Ghiberti’s star student) fluidly integrate multiple scenes in individual sculpted panels that move from low to high relief. Michelangelo, who called the east doors a “divine work,” is also reported to have said that they were worthy to be the “Gates of Paradise” — a play on words that stuck, and that couldn’t be more fitting. The “Gates of Paradise” are absolutely heavenly.
The occasion for the show is the more than 25-year-long restoration of the doors, which have suffered 500 years of injury, including blackening, corrosion, and the damage from the November 1966 flood, the worst in Florence’s history. The flood, which rose to 20 feet, all but ruined Cimabue’s large Santa Croce “Crucifix,” and forced six of the reliefs off the doors. The original doors have since been replaced with cast reproductions. After the run of the Met’s exhibit, which will travel on to Seattle, the reliefs will be permanently reinstalled in their original bronze framework. They will then be placed in a hermetically sealed case in the cathedral museum in Florence, never to travel again.
“Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece,” suitably installed just off the Met’s great hall amid the carved 16th-century Italian ornament in the Vélez Blanco Patio, comprises three of the doors’ narrative panels (“Adam and Eve,” “Jacob and Esau,” and “David and Goliath”), as well as two of the doorframe’s 24 standing prophets and two of its 24 idealized heads in high relief. Each of the narrative panels is 311 /2 inches square, and each is cast from a single piece of bronze.
The Met’s installation has its strengths, which are innumerable, and its weaknesses, which deserve mention. The show’s backdrop is a life-size color reproduction of the doors. Flattening the sculptures, it does not do Ghiberti any favors; but it does reproduce the program at actual size; and it shows where, exactly, each of the three panels, if properly installed, would exist in relationship to one another and to viewers. On the doors, the 10 reliefs are stacked five high in two columns (one column per individual door). All three reliefs at the Met are from the right-hand door. The program begins with the “Adam and Eve” panel, which occupies the far upper-right position on the door, and is somewhere between 11 feet and 15 feet above the floor. “Jacob and Esau,” in the middle of the door, is roughly at eye level. And “David and Goliath,” which is positioned as the lowest relief, exists below the viewer’s waist.
The Met’s exhibition puts all three reliefs at eye-level. Granted, it is remarkable to see Ghiberti’s exquisite details up close, since before they have been available to us only in photographs. In each panel, the artist has given equal attention to the delineation of leaves, birds, clouds, facial expressions, wrinkles, and folds of drapery, regardless of where the reliefs exist within the doors. This handling suggests that each sculpture, rightly so, is self-contained and works from practically any distance or angle. (To demonstrate this, stand back as far as you can from the reliefs; their compositional powers will be evident.)
The “Jacob and Esau” panel, at eye level, is just where it should be. With its curtains, receding arched doorways, and overlapping and intertwining scenes, the relief seamlessly juggles numerous stories and timeframes. It is a cinematic dreamscape that shifts from side to side, as well as deep into space and back to the plane, moving, layering, and opening, as if it were made up of numerous transparent stage sets changing simultaneously on a sliding puzzle. And, like all of Ghiberti’s work, it has a whipping, unfurling line that imbues the scenes, no matter how violent, with humility and grace.
If, however, you worship art the way I do, you will be willing — whether out of reverence or desire for proper perspective — to get down on your knees to view the “Adam and Eve” relief; and to get high on tiptoe to view “David and Goliath.” In “David and Goliath,” it is only while looking down — after you have marveled at the whispered incisions outlining the airy, distant buildings of Jerusalem set behind the panel’s full-figured mountains and the more than 100 soldiers crowded effortlessly into the scene — that you will experience how the inward compression of the relief releases, tumbles, and expels into the downward thrust of David’s sword, as it severs the giant head of Goliath.
In the “Adam and Eve” sculpture, God, with an army of attending angels, spirals out of heaven. He stirs the liquid sky, and he is the whirling force that vibrates through the glittering, atmospheric plane. Seen up close, it is evident that the spiral — the turning in the relief — is the movement of life as well as, in the serpent, the movement of the fall; that Eve’s arm is intertwined with the body of the snake; that Adam’s hand, at his creation, crawls on the rock like an animal; and that Eve’s birth is a golden bubble expanding miraculously in the solid bronze.
Yet it is only while looking upward at the “Adam and Eve” panel that the rising thrust of the multiple scenes, which all radiated from the creation of Eve at the relief’s center, is fully evident. Seen from below, Adam is understood to be the basin of her bubble, as well as the twisting root that binds the relief together. His legs twist inward, toward God, and yet his upper body strains outward and toward the gates of expulsion. He is the source out of which Eve twists and grows; and, like a spring-loaded trap, he is hinge pin of their fall. Eve, as she is expelled from the Garden, arches outward, away from the plane — toward us, the viewers. Looking back at God, she appears to tumble simultaneously backward and upward, as if she were a fish being thrown back into the water.
In “Adam and Eve,” the complete richness of Ghiberti’s spellbinding minutiae can only be understood when you are close enough that your breath fogs up the protective glass; but the panel’s larger moves, transformations, and driving metaphors — the taffy-pull creation to the spring-loaded expulsion to the rising promise of redemption — can only be fully ascertained if you are willing to get down on the floor and look up at God, Adam and Eve, and the angels, as Ghiberti intended for you to do. The view is worth it. But first you have to get to the Met. There are no excuses. The clock is ticking. Heaven may be eternal — and this show may be heaven-sent — but the “Gates of Paradise” won’t be here for ever.
Until January 13 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).