The year is 1401. In Florence, Italy, the wealthy cloth merchants’ guild – the Arte di Calimala – is sponsoring a design contest. The winner will get the job of making a set of new doors for the Baptistery of Saint John. It’s a big deal. The artist who wins the contest will be highly esteemed and famous forever.
The doors will have eight bronze panels, each depicting a different scene from the Bible. Contestants must submit one door panel depicting the Old Testament story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his only son, Isaac.
Start with a Drawing
To make a bronze panel, the artist starts by making a drawing of the scene. Then he, (or she), sculpts the scene in wax, giving it a 3-dimensional appearance.
After the wax panel is completed, it’s immersed into wet clay. When the clay is dry enough to work with, holes deep enough to reach the wax inside are drilled into the edges. Then the whole thing is baked in an oven until the clay is rock-hard.
During the bake, the wax melts and runs out of the holes. That’s right. That one-of-a-kind wax carving is now a blob of hot goo on the oven floor. Hopefully the scene transferred pretty well from the wax to the inside surface of the hardened clay.
When the clay has cooled, the artist seals up the holes on the bottom edge with clay and bakes it again. Now it’s time for the bronze.
A big hunk of bronze is heated until it melts. (It’s going to be something like 1700 degrees Fahrenheit). When the bronze has melted, the artist carefully pours the molten bronze into the holes, filling the empty space where the wax used to be.
Break Out the Hammers!
When everything has cooled, it’s time to break out the hammers and chisels and knock off all the clay. Finally, the artist gets to have some fun! This is the only part of the process where the team gets to release some pent-up anxiety. It’s a happy day for everyone in the studio when it’s time to knock the clay off the bronze.
Pretty soon the scene in bronze starts to emerge from the clay. The artist cuts off the three stems sticking up where the bronze was poured into the holes. He’s left with a bronze panel depicting the scene that was carved in wax, but it’s pretty rough.
Now the hard work really starts. The artist carves, scratches, scrapes, hammers, files, etches, cuts, and polishes the bronze panel until it’s a winner.
The panel depicted down below wasn’t the winner. It wasn’t even one of the finalists. (Putting in the angel shouting “Wait!” probably wasn’t the best idea, eh?)
And the Winner is…
The judges did their duty and selected two other finalists. Their entries were both so good that the judges had a hard time deciding which panel was the best.
The artists who created the two best entries were Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti. What happens next depends on whose version of history you believe.
There were 34 judges, and according to Lorenzo Ghiberti’s account of things, the unanimous and overwhelming consensus was that his panel was the best by far.
Filippo Brunelleschi’s biographer tells a different story. He wrote that the panels from the two finalists were both so good, the judges weren’t able to choose one over the other. They decided to offer a joint award for the two contestants to share.
Filippo Brunelleschi wasn’t having any of that, so he said “Ciao!” and moved to Rome to study architecture. There’s a lot more to the story, but the bottom line is that Lorenzo Ghiberti got the job to build the doors. That’s his panel shown at the top of this post.
And what a job it was. His team worked on the baptistery doors for the next 25 years! They did a good job, though. Those doors are really something.
As predicted, Lorenzo Ghiberti became highly esteemed and famous forever. As well he should be. The guy was amazing. But – the world had not heard the last from Filippo Brunelleschi.
To be continued…
