GHIBERTI, LORENZO. – Sculptor in bronze and writer on art, b. in Florence in 1378, d. there in 1455. In Florence he is the foremost representative of the International Gothic style in sculpture, even if, in his own way, he was sensitive to the spreading humanistic taste and to the new art of perspective in its Donatellian formulation.
In the panel of the Sacrifice of Isaac (Bargello), with which he won in 1401 the competition for the second door of the Baptistery (competing, among others, with Brunelleschi and Jacopo della Quercia), he produced a work of high literary quality, more than poetry, in the impeccable coherence of a pictorial bas-relief. In the reliefs of that same door in gilded bronze (1403–24), these qualities unfold almost everywhere more freely through the inspired accord between the pictorial luminosity of the relief and the extraordinarily subtle music of the sinuous development of the line, reaching accents of true poetry.
During this period G. perhaps executed the S. Jacopo, certainly the S. Giovanni Battista (1414), the S. Matteo (1419–22), and the S. Stefano (later) in the exterior niches of Orsanmichele, as well as two panels for the baptismal font of Siena (1424–27). All these works are somewhat mannered and nobly artisan-like, except for the S. Matteo, a luminous vision of serenity.
In the third door of the Baptistery (1425–52), G., following Donatello’s example, applied the laws of pictorial perspective to bas-relief, using a system of square compartments, with the clear intention of producing a work attuned to the now triumphant taste of the early Renaissance. Yet his art remained inwardly bound to the late Gothic taste, and it was always within the sphere of a fairy-tale vision that he achieved here as well (as also in the Ark of s. Zanobi in the Duomo, 1446) the purity of art. The problem debated by recent criticism—whether G. should be considered always an artist (Schlosser), always a most noble artisan (Galassi), or an artist in the second door and an artisan in the third (L. Venturi)—should probably be resolved by recognizing that he was always endowed with exceptionally high technical and literary abilities, with a surprising and captivating skill, but that, at every moment of his activity, a profound poetic inspiration occasionally succeeded in breaking through that shell which both nourished and stifled II.
In old age he wrote the Commentari, a treatise on artistic technique and theory, with a summary of the history of art that is extremely interesting as a source and noteworthy for its sureness of taste in the section concerning the fourteenth century and in the autobiography. – Vedi tav. XXVI.