Florence’s cloth-importers’ guild (Arte di Calimala), responsible for the Baptistery’s decoration, announces a competition for a new set of bronze doors; entrants are tasked with producing a Sacrifice of Isaac relief panel as the trial piece.
Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi create bronze competition panels (1401–02). The surviving reliefs become key documents of Early Renaissance sculptural experimentation and are later preserved in Florence (Bargello).
Ghiberti receives the formal commission to produce the Baptistery’s second set of bronze doors (later known as the North Doors). Documentation places the commission contract on 1403-11-23, establishing the long-term project under Calimala oversight.
The project’s iconographic plan takes shape around New Testament narratives (plus Evangelists and Church Fathers) in 28 quatrefoil-framed panels, deliberately echoing Andrea Pisano’s earlier door format while pushing toward greater naturalism and narrative complexity.
By the late 1400s (documented by 1407), it is acknowledged that completing the doors within the originally envisioned timeframe is unrealistic, formalizing a longer production horizon for modeling, casting, chasing, and gilding.
After two decades of work (1403–1424), Ghiberti’s completed doors are installed on the Baptistery (recorded installation date: 1424-04-19). They initially occupy the prestigious east-facing position toward the cathedral.
Following the acclaim for the completed second doors, the Calimala commissions Ghiberti for a third set for the Baptistery, later celebrated as the Gates of Paradise. Work is generally dated 1425–1452.
Early in the Gates of Paradise project, the planned 28-panel scheme is reduced to 10 large rectangular reliefs from the Old Testament, enabling more unified compositions and more ambitious spatial and perspectival effects than the earlier quatrefoil format.
Ghiberti’s I Commentarii—a major Early Renaissance text blending art history, theory, and artists’ lives—is completed around c. 1447, illuminating his humanist interests and his understanding of artistic progress and classical models.
Ghiberti executes the Gates of Paradise in gilded bronze over a multi-decade campaign (1425–1452), combining relief depth, classical figure style, and architecturally structured space to showcase Early Renaissance approaches to narrative and illusion.
Upon completion, the Gates of Paradise are installed at the Baptistery’s east entrance (1452). This installation triggers the relocation of Ghiberti’s earlier doors away from the east side, cementing the newer doors’ primacy in Florentine civic-religious display.
Lorenzo Ghiberti dies in Florence in late 1455, closing a career defined by the Baptistery door commissions that shaped the language and prestige of Early Renaissance bronze sculpture in Tuscany.
Lorenzo Ghiberti and the Florence Baptistery Commissions (1403–1455)
