GHIBERTI, LORENZO. - Bronze sculptor and writer on art, b. in Florence in 1378, d. there in 1455. In Florence he is the greatest representative of the flamboyant Gothic in sculpture, even though he was, in his own way, sensitive to the spreading humanistic taste and to the new art of perspective in its Donatellan form.
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 produces a work of lofty literature rather than of poetry, in the impeccable coherence of a pictorial bas-relief. In the reliefs of that same door in gilded bronze (1403-24) those same qualities unfold almost everywhere more freely through the inspired harmony between the pictorial luminosity of the relief and the most subtle music of the sinuous unfolding of line: touching accents of true poetry.
In this period G. executed perhaps the St. James, certainly the St. John the Baptist (1414), the St. Matthew (1419-22) and the St. Stephen (later) in the outer niches of Orsanmichele, as well as two panels for the baptismal font of Siena (1424-27). Works all somewhat mannered and nobly craftsmanlike, except for the St. Matthew, a luminous vision of serenity.
In the third door of the Baptistery (1425-52) G. applied, with the system of square compartments, on the example of Donatello, the laws of pictorial perspective to bas-relief, certainly with the intention of producing a work brought up to date with the now triumphant taste of the early Renaissance. But his art remained intimately bound to the late-Gothic taste, and was always within the sphere of a fairy-tale vision, in which he here too (as also in the Arca di s. Zanobi in the Cathedral, 1446) attains the purity of art. The problem debated by recent criticism, whether G. is to be considered always an artist (Schlosser) or always a most noble craftsman (Galassi), or an artist in the second door and a craftsman in the third (L. Venturi), must probably be resolved in the sense of recognizing that he was always endowed with the highest technical and literary capacities, with a surprising and captious skill, but that, at every moment of his activity, a profound poetic inspiration succeeded at times in breaking through that shell which at once nourished and stifled it.
In old age he wrote the Commentari, a treatise on technique and artistic theory, with a summary of art history that is extremely interesting as a source and remarkable for sureness of taste in the part concerning the fourteenth century and in the autobiography. - See pl. XXVI.
Bibliography5 works
Roberto Salvini
