Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise...in a Nutshell 🌸🎨

#arthistory #learning

Hi folks! Today we are going to be learning about Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise :) These doors are beautiful pieces of artwork that are studied in most art history classes SO I wanted to give you the low down on one of my favorite pieces of artwork from the Italian Renaissance.

Ghiberti created these masterpieces between 1425 and 1452 so we are definitely in the Italian Renaissance. He won a contest between himself and Brunelleschi and that was how he was able to create such a masterpiece on the florentine baptistery. What's interesting is Brunelleschi is the guy who was the mastermind behind creating the Dome on the Florentine Cathedral that was a wonder at the time because it was so huge and circular and something like that had never been built before. But that's a topic for a future video 😍

Anyway, these doors are located in Florence and they are 17 feet tall. They are pure bronze so they weigh three tons!!

They are called the Gates of Paradise because Michelangelo referred to them as such when he first saw them 😊

The reason these doors were commissioned by the richest guild at this time and why they were so important is because if you go back to the ancient Romans, doors were heavily decorated and ornate. A great example is the Pantheon in Rome where the doors are bronze. So these doors carried on the tradition of being bronze, ornate, and a passage way to something sacred.

There are 10 square scenes that have incredible depth. Ghiberti used 3 dimensional space to keep with the new notion of naturalism and having one focal point.

This type of artwork is called relief sculpture because it creates this optical illusion that the bigger, more pronounced characters are up front. While the images in the background are pretty faint.

The scenes are all from the book of Genesis so you have the story of Adam and Eve and Jacob and Esau.

But the most important feature is Ghiberti’s appreciation for gracefully posed figures, and how the skeletal system and muscular structure moves the human body.

I hope this helped you if you are studying art history, or if you are just an art history nerd like me and love to learn this stuff in your free time!

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Видео Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise...in a Nutshell 🌸🎨 канала Kelsie Marie