THE BAPTISTERY COMPETITION - SACRIFICE OF ISAAC

FLORENTINE BAPTISTERY COMPETITION - SACRIFICE OF ISAAC

In 1401 the cloth trade guild of Florence, the Arte di Calimala, held a competition
to decide what artist would be given the commission for the bronze panels on the two sets of doors of the Florentine Baptistery still in need of decoration : the North and East doors. Several artists competed for the prize, but only two entries have survived, the panels
produced by the finalists, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi. Both panels
are now displayed together on one of the walls of the Bargello Museum in
Florence, so it is possible to stand in front of them and pretend to be one of the judges
in the competition. The artists were asked to illustrate the same story: the Sacrifice of Isaac
from the Old Testament, Genesis Chapter 22, verses 1-18.
         Here is the text from the King James version of the Bible in English:
"And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.  Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.  And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.
     And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.  And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father, and he said, Here am I my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for the burnt offering; so they went both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told him of: and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.
      And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me.
     And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen. And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time, And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice. So Abraham returned unto his young men, and they rose up and went together to Beersheba."

Both panels were made of gilded bronze. Both had to contain the story within the quatrefoil form. Both panels have the same elements of the story (highlighted above in green):  Abraham, the donkey, the two male companions, the altar with wood and fire,  Isaac, the intervening angel, and the ram.

Each artist chooses his own arrangement of the elements, though, and in the process also emphasizes different things about the story. 

BRUNELLESCHI's PANEL:

 

Brunelleschi divides his composition horizontally over the back of the donkey, 

a line continued on either side by the shoulders of the the left companion and the back of the right one.

He places the extraneous elements, the two companions and the donkey, below that line, and the central
protagonists in the story above that line. All three figures below the line distract from the main scene, however. The companion to the left, as has often been observed, is a copy of the ancient statue of the boy removing a thorn from his foot, Lo Spinario:


 

The donkey munches the grass on the ground while the other companion looks awkwardly up at the main scene while fiddling with the strap on his boot.

 

 The scene of the Sacrifice itself is wrought with tension. 

Abraham is actually touching the child's throat with his knife, Isaac's mouth is open in a scream while his body twists awkwardly away with his hands tied behind his back. The angel's hand grabs Abraham to stop him from killing his own son, and Abraham has wild eyes reflecting the madness inherent in the act.

All of Brunelleschi's drama concentrates on the emotions of the horror of a father placing his own son on an altar as burnt offering. That central section of his panel is powerful and the viewer responds to the terror Isaac feels as his father grabs his face with one hand while attempting to plunge a knife with the other. Brunelleschi knows he has chosen the most horrifying moment to put on display. He alleviates the intensity and pain of the scene in two ways: 1) with the bas-relief on the altar showing the moment afterwards, when God blesses Abraham for his willingness to obey God even to the point of destroying his own child:

Isaac in this scene lifts up his hands to comfort his father sitting on the altar as God's angel comes in from the left with a branch of peace, and 2) with the comic relief of the ram who scratches a flea with his foot as he waits for his own turn at sacrifice:

The power of Brunelleschi's emotional drama makes a riveting scene, if one discounts the extraneous elements. But Brunelleschi is not the one who wins this competition. How does Ghiberti organize the story?

GHIBERTI's PANEL

Ghiberti divides the story in half vertically and diagonally. On the left of the slanted line of the mountain, he places the two companions with a donkey. They appear to look at each other, witness figures for the main scene:

They make a coherent group together with the donkey, rather than being separated as in Brunelleschi's panel.

 

The ram appears at the top of the mountain, at the same level as the angel on the right, who points to the ram as the substitute sacrifice.

 

Instead of the exact instant when the angel grabs Abraham's arm, Ghiberti chooses another time in the drama; he depicts the moment just before the knife nears the son's throat, the moment before the angel touches Abraham. The tension before the apex allows the artist to display the beautiful nude torso of Isaac in full array; Ghiberti's skill in rendering perfect anatomical abdominal and pectoral muscles is also on display. 

Rather than emphasizing the emotional pinnacle of the story, as Brunelleschi does, Ghiberti shows more restraint in his version, holding Abraham back with arm still cocked, allowing the viewer to believe that Abraham is not really capable of killing his own child.

Even the altar does not need to make up for the tension among the players and has only foliate decoration on it to suggest that the story took place in ancient times. Isaac's robe is lying in front of the altar, as Ghiberti intimates it has just fallen off the child as his father has tied his hands. The movement of the angel flying in a foreshortened body above the heads of the two male figures, as well as the upward flip of the end of the robe that Abraham is wearing, as well as the turn of the head of Isaac, all contribute to the feeling that we are watching a video rather than a still sculpture. Ghiberti wants the viewer to imagine the end action, the father lowering his arm with the knife, the angel fetching the ram to substitute for the child, the child stepping down from the altar to retrieve his own clothing.

     

 Ghiberti's version, though, does not have the emotional drama that the viewer notices in Brunelleschi's panel.

What Ghiberti's panel has that Brunelleschi's panel does not, is beauty. The beauty of Isaac's idealized body is placed on the beautiful altar. The angel flies in gracefully, Abraham's arm is beautifully aligned with the shoulders of his son.

Their hair is beautifully coiffed and curled.
          The other noticeable element that cinched Ghiberti's win is the cloth. The drapery Abraham wears flows gracefully in regular curves of cloth around his body and then his arm sends out a stylish flow of cloth out behind his body into the air. The cloaks donned by the two companions are what the viewer notices before even the donkey. The ram is even showing off his wool.  If you are the guild that makes its wealth from the major cloth trade in Europe, especially from wool, the display of cloth alone would be a reason for giving the prize of the competition to Ghiberti. 

  And certainly the guild worried about the cost of producing two sets of doors in bronze relief; as other scholars have pointed out, Ghiberti's panels were cheaper to make because he used the back of the bronze to carve out the high relief figures rather than attaching separate figures to the flat background.

Here are the backs of Ghiberti's panel on the left and Brunelleschi's on the right. You can see the indentation in Ghiberti's panel for the body of Abraham; the air of the indentation meant that the weight of the panel was less and the amount of bronze needed to fill in the scene was less, reducing the cost.
        While Ghiberti's casting technique may have impressed the judges from the Calimala, the weight and monetary considerations were not what made his panel win. The competition panels are a wonderful comparison of two kinds of art: Renaissance and Gothic.

Gothic art tends to be interested in the emotional value of Biblical stories because those are what appeal to an illiterate congregation. The story of Abraham sacrificing his own son is an awkward, horrifying ordeal for the central characters and that is how Brunelleschi portrayed it: the body of the son is twisted and ugly, the face of the father is struck by fear and loathing, the figures of the companions and donkey are placed in wrenching ways to support the intense wrestling of Abraham's soul in reaching the limit of obedience to God's covenant. For Brunelleschi the religious story was part of the medieval mind-set where every human action was produced in relation to faith and church.

Renaissance art tends to be interested in the public display of beauty, no matter what the subject. The desire of Renaissance artists to rival the ancients in showing knowledge of anatomy and in idealizing human figures is part of their awareness that the individual is more important than the religious group.

When you add those ideas to a realization that Ghiberti understood his panel would eventually be public art and that he knew the merchants who were his patrons were interested in the sellability of products, it is clear that his choices are not those of a Gothic artist but are new, and are part of a new reliance on ancient art rather than on Gothic art in order to make a new statement about what matters:  individual humanity and beautiful form.

It's not that Ghiberti doesn't tell the story; he tells it clearly and with some force, but his true intent is not to illustrate the story so much as to make sure he has a job for the rest of his life. According to his own account in Commentarii, he consulted with the guild members to make sure he made a panel that would please them. He realized from that interchange that he needed to present their wares in the best light, hence the emphasis on the drapery. He knew that, as businessmen, they would want to be up-to-date with the latest technology and would want their craft to be seen to best advantage on the best billboard in town: the building where every child was baptized in the most public of piazzas.

He wrapped the central character in cloth that flowed in the wind; he displayed youthful nudity in the figure of the son. He decorated his altar with beautiful foliage and draped the boy's cloth in lovely folds beneath it. His audience is not the church or the faithful of the church, although he does not ignore that audience. His audience is the new merchant class of Florence, the people with money to buy nice things. He gives them beauty on a plate without much tension because he knows that beauty is nourishment. His panel nourishes the viewer now as it did the judging panel then. Ghiberti's beautiful old man stepping out on his left foot, his perfectly toned young son, his beautifully adorned young witness figures win the competition in full fashion. After all, Abraham doesn't kill his child, in the end; he just wants God to bless him. 

                                                 

 

FLORENTINE BAPTISTERY DOORS

FLORENTINE BAPTISTERY DOORS

If, as we have reasoned in another blog, the Renaissance in Italy starts in Florence, then it is in the octagonal structure of the Baptistery in Florence, that the Renaissance begins.

Why the Baptistery? It is hardly a Renaissance building; it was even thought during the Renaissance to have been originally a Roman Temple to Mars. It is actually a Romanesque Christian building consecrated in 1059, but it is also the very building where the ritual life for a Christian child in Renaissance Florence began. Upon baptism, the 15th-century Florentine citizen was able to participate in other Christian sacraments and to enter the sacred space of the Cathedral; without baptism, entry was denied. THE BAPTISTERY, then, is the GATEWAY to Florentine civic life.
         It is also the very building for which we have a documented art contest in the beginning years of the 15th century.  Fitting place, then, to mark the beginning of a new artistic vision in Italian culture. The art contest was held in 1401 for the decoration of the doors of this building, and the contest was won by a goldsmith named Lorenzo Ghiberti over Filippo Brunelleschi. Since all beginnings have pasts, it is also natural that the Baptistery already had doors on one side (the South side) before the Arte di Calimala took it upon themselves to pay for the decoration of the other two doors on the north and east by Ghiberti. What this guild and Ghiberti chose as subjects for the decoration of the Baptistery doors says much about the culture in which they lived. How Ghiberti renders these bronze panels says much about the change from Gothic to Renaissance art. The style of the panels will be discussed in another blog, as will the stories on the north and south.
            The Baptistery is an octagonal building that is sheathed in marble from Prato and Carrara. Three sets of doors form entrances on three sides and one side has no entrance because the altar is placed on that side. The decorative program for the doors selects 3 subjects for display together with particular role models:                      The patron saint of the city, John the Baptist, has his story told first, on the South doors, by Andrea Pisano in 1330 in bronze quatrefoils. Below those stories are 8 single quatrefoils with a female figure in each.

The main protagonist of the NEW TESTAMENT, Christ, has his story told by Ghiberti on the North doors between 1403-1425, also in quatrefoils. (These doors are the ones closest to Via Cavour.) Below the quatrefoils with Christ's stories are 8 quatrefoils each with a single figure of a man at a desk with a lectern.

And the stories from the beginning of the Bible, all from the OLD TESTAMENT, have a place on the East doors completed last by Ghiberti from 1425-52, this time in gilded bronze squares.(These doors are those directly across from the Cathedral doors.)

      For this blog entry, I wish to examine the quatrefoils of single figures below the stories on the north and south doors and to relate them to the east doors.
      On the South doors Pisano sculpts 8 female bronze VIRTUE figures labelled below John's story.  The left door presents on the upper layer of  4:
                                           SPES  (HOPE)             FIDES (FAITH)

                             winged and reaching for the light          holding chalice and cross
Right door:
                               CHARITAS                                           UMILITAS

 

 holds a heart and cornucopia                               hooded figure with clasped cloak holds candle

Left door lower tier of 4:  FORTITUDO                                            TEMPERANTIA

wears a helmet, holds a club and a shield       

                                                                   holds a sword that she is putting back into its sheath

Right door:
                    IUSTITIA                                             PRUDENTIA

     

holds a sword and balance scales             holds serpent in right hand and mirror in left

    All of the figures underneath the stories in the panels nearest the viewer represent ideals that are  favored by the community. What are the ideals chosen for display on this South door?
upper tier
3 theological virtues mentioned in Corinthians 13:
SPES - hope - the least judgmental of the virtues, the positive desire of all humans to aspire to live happily
FIDES - faith - a virtue to be expected on a Christian house of worship, holds the cross, symbol of the Crucifixion, and the chalice for the wine of the mass that transubstantiates into Christ's blood; represents belief that Christ died for people's sins and that the wine of the mass is Christ's blood given in sacrifice
CHARITAS - charity or love - generosity of spirit (hence, the heart) and provider of bounty (food) in the shape of the cornucopia
1 virtue added:
HUMILITAS - humility -the need for human beings to be humble; in this case the woman covers herself completely and holds a candle, faces towards faith, hope, and charity in deference.
_____________

lower tier: 4 of the cardinal virtues
FORTITUDO - fortitude, literally, physical strength, with protective devices of helmet, club, shield
TEMPERANTIA - temperance, which here means restraint from violence since the sword is going back into the sheath, a closing down of anger, a moderation of ire, careful decision-making
IUSTITIA -justice, revenge upon evil with a sword, a balance of wise choices in court cases, judgments that are sound, fairness in laws
PRUDENTIA - prudence, knowing yourself well (in the form of the mirror), knowing limits, being aware of danger (in the shape of a snake), but also being astute and self-protective like the snake
(there being a long tradition referring to the astuteness of the snake "astutia serpentis" or "prudentes serpentis" coming from Christ's words in Matthew about the importance of being as simple as the dove and as astute as the serpent.)


These values represent sometimes restrictions on human behavior (prudence, temperance, humility), sometimes inspirations for human behavior (faith, justice, charity), and sometimes just wishes for the well-being of the citizens (hope, fortitude). Viewers who could not read the letters could understand the concepts by the attributes held by the female figures.
       WHY ARE THEY ALL WOMEN?  They are female figures because the Latin nouns they represent are all feminine, even Fortitudo. 
 
When Ghiberti comes to imitate Pisano's arrangement on his opposite door produced in 1403-25,  he places 8 male figures to balance those female virtues:  4 Evangelists and 4 Church Fathers.
These represent actual MALES who existed (or are thought to have existed) in history:
Left door (upper layer of 4):

ST. JOHN (the Evangelist)                                                                            ST. MATTHEW   

 gazes at an eagle, his symbol

















                                                                               converses with an angel, his symbol


Right door upper level: ST. LUKE                                          ST. MARK

looks at the cow, his symbol, peeking around             listens to the winged lion, his symbol
the corner of  the desk

Lower tier 4, left door:

           ST. AMBROSE                                 ST. JEROME                           

 

reads two books, has whip in lap                  writes in one book, translates from another

wears bishop's miter (Bishop of Milano)       no bishop's miter (translated Bible into Latin)

lower tier right door:
          ST. GREGORY                                                          ST. AUGUSTINE

had pen in right hand, has bird near ear                       right hand points to self, lifts book with left, 

no miter, Gregorian chant author                                has bishop's miter (Bishop of Hippo)

                        

(Please note that I differ from Krautheimer in the identification of Ambrose and Augustine; for him the first saint on left is Augustine, but the whip intimated in that saint's panel can only be the attribute of Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who was known for his castigations of heretics, not of Augustine, whose gesture in the right end saint toward himself with book held out is appropriate for the writer of the first autobiography, Confessions.)

The choice of 4 Evangelists, John, Matthew, Luke and Mark, is an appropriate one for this door since they are the four writers of the New Testament books of the Bible where the LIFE OF CHRIST is told. They form the underpinning literally and literarily of the bronze panels placed above them. The choice of the 4 Fathers of the Church, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory, and Augustine, is also appropriate in that they are the leaders of the early church who establish the texts, both read and sung, for the liturgy used in the Baptistery. One, Ambrose, actually baptized another, Augustine, so they appear for that additional reason.

In the pairing of 8 FEMALE VIRTUES with 8 MORAL MEN,  it is clear that Ghiberti and the programmers who helped design the doors felt the need for a balance of feminine and masculine models for baptized Christians to follow, models of wisdom for the whole community. Hardly surprising in a city where the spoken language has only masculine and feminine nouns (no neuter). The sexualized noun structure in oral Italian is mirrored on the first two doors created, even if the nouns on the south door are Latin. The contributions of both men and women to the society are also acknowledged on these doors, an auspicious decoration for a building whose function was the recognition of and inclusion into society of the happy results of the unions of men and women. The men on one door and the women on the other protect the sacred space where both male and female infants, the children that come from the unions of men and women of the Christian community are brought to the altar for blessing.
        What happens, then, when we look at the third east door that portrays the oldest of all the stories chosen?

 Men and women figure together again, this time in stories that often narrate creation themes or birthright issues or rivalries shaped at birth. Ghiberti begins the panels of these East doors with the most basic of all myths: the creation myth from the beginning of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, shown in the uppermost left panel on the left door. Instead of God's creation of heaven and earth or his creation of darkness and light, the very first scenes in Genesis, however, Ghiberti skips ahead in the Bible to the emergence of humans in the scenes of the Creation of Adam and Eve. Ghiberti himself, in his Commentarii, Book II, describes the making of the East doors, “Cominciai con Dio che creo l’uomo e la femina.”("I began with God who created man and woman" - my trans.) The balance of masculine and feminine can be found in this panel as well as several others on the door, including the final panel of the Meeting of Solomon and Sheba.       

Adam appears four times in this panel, Eve three. Adam is being raised from the earth (his name means "earth") by God in the lower left corner. (Michelangelo, who called Ghiberti's doors the "Gates of Paradise," certainly must have had this bronze image in mind when painting his Creation of Adam scene on the Sistine ceiling in Rome in 1508-12.)

In the middle scene Eve takes center stage, emerging from Adam's rib while he sleeps on a primitive bed. God blesses Eve as she reaches to touch him.

The next scene in the narrative appears in the far left corner, in very low relief; Eve entices Adam with an apple, while the devil who has tempted her in the form of a she-snake winds around the tree between them:

Adam and Eve both disobey God when they eat of the Tree of Knowledge, something strictly forbidden by God. With their sin comes their expulsion from the Garden of Eden and their awareness of their own nakedness for the first time:

Ghiberti's version shows God the Father with an entourage of angels in heaven sending down an angel of wrath through the gate to punish the first humans by exiling them from Paradise. Eve looks up at the angel while covering her genital area with leaves and Adam cowers behind her, keeping his own nudity covered by her body.While Ghiberti exposes the full beauty of the female body in the central scene of Eve's birth, he also pushes her nearly nude body to the foreground in the scene of the fall, so that all viewers can be nourished by its beauty; her body on the right is in such high relief, it is nearly free-standing sculpture. The nudity of the male and female Adam and Eve is a reminder to all humans that they come into the world naked, like the infants baptized in the building. The nudity is also a reminder to all viewers that the conjoining of naked bodies is what produces the infants who end up baptized inside the building. Ghiberti chooses to mute the cries of Adam and Eve upon expulsion (God delivers the punishment second hand and Eve's face is turned up so we can't see her expression; we can't see Adam at all). His scene, though similar in the positions of the three figures and the simple architecture of the gate, is very unlike the same scene depicted by Masaccio during the same period in the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine; as Masaccio treats the theme, Adam and Eve are consumed with woe for their transgression because they realize that now that they are cast out of the Garden, they will no longer have eternal life, they know for the first time that they will experience death:

 

In Ghiberti's hands it almost looks as though Eve is shouting up to the angel to say goodbye, not to show remorse or guilt.
          The sin of the Original Couple, while not omitted in Ghiberti's version, is sidelined literally, and it is the beauty of the naked bodies of the two joined together in the center that stands out in the scene. The masculine and the feminine are on display in balanced, rhythmic lines that speak of grace more than disharmony. Human sin is much more forgiveable in Ghiberti's view of life, perhaps a wisdom gained by his own experience of growing up in a family where his mother had left his biological father for the goldsmith who trained him. He acknowledges the problems caused by original sin in designing this set of doors to be read from the top down in imitation of the Fall, while his north doors are read from the bottom up, as Christ's story and his Resurrection lift all sinners up from the depression of death.  But throughout the narratives illustrated by Ghiberti on the East side, men and women are presented as "made in God's image," with the potential for divinity in their aspect and lives.      
           The end of the series of Old Testament stories on the East door is the panel at the farthest and lowest right with the subject of the MEETING OF SOLOMON AND SHEBA. In less high-relief than Eve, the male and female figures are joined by hands in the center of a vast architectural space.  In Ghiberti's rendering, the story resembles a wedding in a cathedral, complete with groups of followers divided into bride and groom pews.
  

 

Sheba and Solomon are clothed and stand in front of the temple with three openings, much like the three openings of the cathedral across from the door itself. Harmonic friendship between a man and a woman, the essence of matrimony, is what this Old Testament panel implies. It is not the joining of right hands here, the unctio dextrarum, which signified a traditional marriage in the ancient world; here they join left hands. In the 15th-century marriages were not conducted in churches but at home, so the resemblance to marriage is only a modern imposition, but the resolution of Adam and Eve's nakedness and sin by the joined civilized royal personages in the last panel of the doors, gives a structure of completion to the battle of the sexes implied in the first panel. Ghiberti's answer to the question of sin is a balancing of the sexes, both masculine and feminine elements, equal and happy together. Since the infant mortality rate in 15th-century Florence was very high, the coming together of the sexes in a contented meeting suggests a way to ensure the survival of the most vulnerable of the community.
          In the East doors the artist begins and ends with the masculine and feminine distinctions, the propagating elements in the grammar. The child looking up at the pair in the Solomon and Sheba scene is the last reminder of the baptismal expectation for the viewer upon entering the building. What is a positive view of parental balance is presented in a drama that has a new Renaissance emphasis on symmetry, equal number of feminine and masculine protagonists, imitation of nature in perspective and anatomy, and an idealization of what is most noble about the human condition. The sin of Adam and Eve can be washed away in the civilizing ritual of the community's baptism, that baptism at once the hope and confession of the other entrances to the building.



(My thanks to Professor Jan Mathias Papi, who checked on the North Door panels and found out they are now (except for St. Luke) in the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence for cleaning- October, 2013.)

SHORT SUBJECT SUMMARY FOR BAPTISTERY DOORS:

SOUTH - ANDREA PISANO -1330 - EARLIEST Baptistery doors -gilded bronze
28 PANELS ALTOGETHER, 14 PANELS EACH DOOR STORIES OF THE LIFE OF JOHN THE BAPTIST - 10 STORY PANELS EACH DOOR, 20 story panels altogether
read from top to bottom, left to right not crossing over doors
8 VIRTUES at bottom  -3 THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES plus Humility and  4 CARDINAL VIRTUES 
SPES (HOPE)       FIDES (FAITH)                    CHARITAS (CHARITY)   HUMILITAS (HUMILITY)

FORTITUDO        TEMPERANTIA                   IUSTITIA                          PRUDENTIA      
(FORTITUDE)      (TEMPERANCE)                  (JUSTICE)                        (PRUDENCE)


NORTH - LORENZO GHIBERTI -  1402-1425
28 PANELS ALTOGETHER, 14 PANELS EACH DOOR STORIES OF THE LIFE OF CHRIST
10 STORY PANELS EACH DOOR, 20 story panels altogether/ Read from bottom to top left to right crossing over the two doors, beginning lowest left corner with Annunciation - read 4 panels across all the way RIGHT THEN START AGAIN ON LEFT AND READ ACROSS up to the last panel (Emmaeus) in upper right corner
OVER
8 PANELS AT BOTTOM - 4 EVANGELISTS OVER 

                                            4 FATHERS OF THE CHURCH 


JOHN                           MATTHEW                     LUKE                  MARK

AMBROSE                  JEROME                         GREGORY          AUGUSTINE



EAST - LORENZO GHIBERTI (Frame -Vittorio Ghiberti) - 1425-52
OLD TESTAMENT STORIES
10 PANELS  ALTOGETHER - read from top to bottom left to right across the two doors
l large panel per door - 5 panels per door