Episode 57: Florence – North Doors of Florence Baptistry

Buongiorno, I’m Dr. Rocky Ruggiero. Join me in rebuilding the Renaissance and making art and history come to life.

Welcome to the Rebuilding the Renaissance podcast, your guide to the art and history of Italy, from the glory of Rome to the magnificence of the Renaissance. And now here’s your host, Dr. Rocky Ruggiero.

Buongiorno everyone, today’s podcast is essentially a continuation of the last. You may remember that in my last podcast, we were discussing the famous competition of 1401 for the contract for a set of bronze doors to adorn Florence Baptistery. You may remember that the two finalists in the competition were Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, and that the winner was in fact Lorenzo Ghiberti.

The competition took place in the year 1401 and a couple of years later in 1403, Ghiberti would in fact begin the creation of his so-called Northern Doors, now essentially two doors filling a single aperture or portal. A portal is a space meant to accommodate a door, and these two doors would fill the eastern portal of the Baptistery. This is where they were placed originally, and you may remember that I mentioned that that competition was not the direct cause for the production of Ghiberti’s more famous doors, which are the Gates of Paradise.

In other words, he produced this first set of doors, which today we call the Northern Doors. They were inserted into the eastern portal of the Baptistery, which is where they remained until the later more famous Gates of Paradise were completed in 1452. And at that point, the first set of Ghiberti doors were move from the eastern portal to the northern portal and the Gates of Paradise were inserted into the eastern portal instead. So, we call them the Northern Doors because that’s where the doors stood up until fairly recently. But in reality, they were originally the eastern doors of the Baptistery.

Today if you visit Florence, the doors that you see on the northern side of the Baptistery are copies. The original doors are located in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, known better in English as the Cathedral Museum, and the venue, the presentation of the doors is nothing less than spectacular. So make sure to visit the Cathedral Museum if in fact you are in the city of Florence.

The doors that Ghiberti produced between the years 1403 and 1424, so 21 years to produce the so-called Northern Doors, which again were the direct result of this competition of the year 1401. The subject matter of the doors is New Testament. Remember the prize was for 28 panels, 14 per door, and the subject matter depicting New Testament imagery.

If you’re standing looking at either the copies on the Baptistery, or if you are in the Cathedral Museum looking at the originals, or if you’re simply looking at a computer with a photograph of the image itself, we’re talking about doors that were produced in the early 15th century. By which time of course, we’re presuming that those innovations introduced by Giotto a hundred years earlier in making narrative cycles user friendly, as I like to describe them.

In other words, making these scenes readable for a general public audience. You would expect to start reading the scenes in the top left hand corner, which is something that began with Giotto. Instead, Ghiberti’s panels are organized in a completely different way. And this is testimony to the fact that what won him the competition back in 1401 was that Ghiberti was the more successful international Gothic-style artist, which remember was the style that was in vogue, not just in Florence, but throughout all of Europe. Hence this international term that we actually attached to it.

And so he was the one who won the competition because this is the stuff that they were looking for, so we’re not yet into this fully Renaissance style. We’re still looking at international Gothic style artwork, because in fact, the panels or the narrative itself of the doors begins in the lower left hand side. Now if you’re looking at the doors, what we’re going to do is eliminate the two bottom rows immediately. The lowest row of panels, four of them, two per door, depict the four doctors of the church.

Going from left to right, those doctors are St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory the Great and St. Ambrose, we’ll knock off that row four right off the bat at the bottom, the row of four panels going left or right directly above, instead depict the Four Evangelists. And if you remember back to my podcast saints and symbols, the Evangelists can be identified by certain symbols that are always associated with them.

So reading left to right, the first evangelist is St. John the Evangelist, identifiable because there is an eagle to pick did with him, which is his definitive attribute. In the next panel we have St. Matthew the Evangelist, and we know it’s St. Matthew because there is an angel there with him. In the next we have St. Luke and we know at Saint Luke because there is a little ox sticking its head out from behind the lectern. And the final panel instead depicts St. Mark, identifiable because of the winged lion, which is his attribute. And again one that is ubiquitous throughout the city of Venice because St. Mark was their patron saint. In fact, we’ll be talking about the association between Mark and Venice in a later podcast.

So we’ve knocked off eight of these panels right off the bat, the two lower rows of four. So we have 20 panels remaining. And again, your instinct is to start reading in the upper left hand corner. Instead, Ghiberti begins the narrative of the life of Christ in the lower left. And we read the panels left to right, bottom to top, much the same way Northern European stained glass window narratives were organized. And so the idea again that the artwork that was being produced at the time was artwork that was more influenced from Northern European art or by Northern European art than it was by central Italian, meaning Florence and Rome.

And the first panel logically depicts the annunciation, and so we began all the way back with this story that is recounted in the Gospel of Luke of how the Angel Gabriel came to announce to Mary that she was to be the mother of God. That is that first panel, so three rows up from the bottom to the far left hand side. And you’ll clearly see that the same attributes that won Ghiberti the competition in 1401 are very much present here.

In fact, all of the panels are quatrefoils. And so, we go back to this competition and the idea is why did they ask Ghiberti and Brunelleschi and everyone else who competed to depict the sacrifice of Isaac in quatrefoil frames, so that when the judges were looking at those competition panels, all they had to do was to imagine that panel multiplied 28 times to get a pretty accurate idea of what the doors would eventually look like.

And so we have the same thing here. All of the scenes and all the figures framed in these quatrefoil frames. And when you look at this and enunciation, you’ll see again these exaggerated curvilinear postures and positions of the figures, typical of this international style. So, these C-curves and these S-curves that you see these pendulum curves of the drapery wrapping around the figure. So again, Ghiberti sticking to his guns. That’s why they chose him. This is what he’s good at and this is what he is going to do.

In the next scene, so the immediate right of the enunciation, we have the nativity, and you’ll see postpartum Mary just off to the left of the center of the panel with Christ wrapped in his swaddling clothes just below her to the right of the nativity. The next scene is the Adoration of the Magi, so the Three Kings bringing their gifts to Christ.

The next scene is really the only episode that we have in the gospels of Jesus’s adolescence. It is Jesus amongst the elders, and if you’re not familiar with the story, it really is one that represents a holy family, which was also quite human. Because the story goes that the three of them decided to visit the big city, which of course was Jerusalem, and as they were leaving Jerusalem, Joseph looked at Mary and said, “I thought you had him.” Mary looked at Joseph and said, “I thought you had him,” and they realize that they have left Jesus behind in Jerusalem and like any parents would do, they were stricken with worry, with fear, of course that something had happened.

And so they run back in and they make that announcement over the PR system, “We have a little lost boy. His name is Jesus Christ. He walks on water. He turns water into wine. Anyone seeing the boy, please contact us here.” And in fact, as they’re looking frantically to find their lost son, they find him in the temple discussing with the rabbis, and Christ, sort of surprised to see they’re surprising. Well, where else do you think I would have been? So Christ amongst the elders completes this first horizontal row of four scenes.

And from there now, we go diagonally up to the left. So we are one, two, three, four horizontal rows up from the bottom, starting on the far left hand side, where we have the baptism of Christ, John the Baptist, baptizing Jesus Christ in the River Jordan. The next scene is the Temptation of Christ. And you have this very particular looking Satan figure who’s kind of cringing away from Jesus with rams’ horns and bat wings in these large kind of claws that stick out as well, and Jesus to the upper right of him.

You’ll notice of course that none of these scenes really have any background at all, any sense of depth, and this is something that we didn’t talk about in the competition panels because this is something that they simply were not doing yet at the beginning of the 15th century. So these sort of flat two dimensional surfaces.

Okay to the right of that, so we’ve actually gone from one door to the other. We have Jesus expelling the merchants from the temple, and when essentially he gets angry with them for having transformed his father’s house into a market. And so he drives them out. The next scene is Jesus performing one of his greatest party tricks, which is walking on water. And you’ll see him actually in the far right hand side of the panel walking on water, and as Peter futilely tries to do the same thing.

Okay, we zoom up again to the left, so we’re at the far right hand side. We’re going to zoom to the far left hand side, five rows up. And here we have a scene that you don’t see very often represented. And that is the transfiguration. The transfiguration was when Jesus brought three of his apostles, named Peter, James and John, up to Mount Tabor, and there when Jesus went off to pray, the apostles did what they always do and that was to fall asleep.

In fact, I may have already shared this theory with you in past podcasts, or if you read my blogs, I know that I’ve discussed this and that is my belief that the apostles were narcoleptic, because every time Jesus leaves them in gospel stories, they inevitably fall asleep. And this is another episode that supports my theory of narcolepsy in the apostles. Just keep that in mind, right, won’t push it any further.

Anyway, they wake up because there’s this blinding light, and there is Jesus hovering in the sky transformed into pure light and flanked on other side by the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, who are Moses and Elijah. So, Jesus was transfigured. He was essentially transformed from his human flesh form into his divine illuminary form, and so the idea of the transfiguration being the moment when Christ revealed himself as being divine while still in human form.

The next panel depicts one of Jesus’s most celebrated miracles. And that of course is the raising of Lazarus. His good friend Lazarus had died. Christ was not there at his death. He was away in a town called Bethany. So one of Lazarus’s sisters, I believe it was Mary or Martha, I can’t remember, one of the two, went to call Jesus back, and said to him, “Jesus, if you had been there, our brother would never have died.” To which Jesus responds, “Oh ye of little faith.” In other words, doesn’t matter when your brother died, I’m Jesus, and so therefore I can do anything.

So, he goes to the tomb where Lazarus has been resting for the last four days. So Jesus shows up four days after Lazarus had died, and he orders that the tomb slab being moved away, at which point people protest. Because of course they know that after just a couple of days, a rotting corpse will give off a rather disturbing odor. Putrefying flesh is one of the most disgusting things that you could smell, and Jesus insists. In fact, this is the episode where I believe the exclamation Jesus Christ came into being, because when Jesus ordered that stone to be moved, the guy next to him said, “Jesus Christ, he’s been in there for four days. Are you crazy?” But Christ insisted, and so they moved the slab and Christ then exclaims Lazarus come forth. And in fact, that’s exactly what he does. And so this is Jesus’s miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead.

Okay, the next scene instead depicts Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The event that we celebrate in the Catholic calendar on Palm Sunday, so that technically the people of Jerusalem wove palms and laid them on the ground before Christ to welcome him as a king. And so the idea that the king’s feet nor the feet of the donkey that Jesus rode should have touched the ground and been soiled, and so they put those poems down on the ground to welcome him. And of course this is the event that marks the beginning of Holy Week. This is the event that marks the beginning of what we call the Passion of Jesus Christ.

So we go directly from Palm Sunday event, which is the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and the final scene in this row of four is one that I think is instantly recognizable to anyone who’s familiar. And even if you’re not familiar with Christian iconography, and that is The Last Supper. You see Jesus with 12, soon to be 11 of his best friends, sitting and sharing a Passover meal. This was technically a Seder that took place in the upper room of a tavern, and curiously Ghiberti kind of taking a page out of Giotto’s book by arranging the figures, all 13 of them, around the table.

In other words, it’s not that sort of lay-in-our-desk Last Supper that we’ll be talking about in a later podcast, where they’re all sitting on one side and Jesus by his lonesome on the other. Instead, everyone kind of spread around the table to make it look a bit more realistic.

From there, so we’re at the far right hand side now. We’re going to go up to the left again. Okay, so we are now six rows up from the bottom. And that first scene on the far left hand side is one that’s very difficult to make out. It is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, which is usually referred to as the Agony in the Garden. And the reason it’s so difficult to make out is because of this international Gothic stuff. Ghiberti has props. He’s trying to create the setting of a garden, of this kind of green botanical area, what have you, but the stones and the figures that you see and the figure of Jesus Christ technically make it kind of confusing. You really have to strain your eyes.

Now if you’re familiar of course with the subject itself, you’ll recognize Jesus looking up. And there’s an angel there with that cup, because this is the moment where Jesus actually had doubt, this moment where essentially where he confronted his father and asked if he actually had to go through with this plan for him to die. And he asked for the cup of suffering to pass it from him. And this is where this notion technically of the angel presenting the cup to Jesus actually comes from.

So, it again gives us an idea that this international style, which is still very much a Gothic-inspired style, was much more interested in ornamentation then it wasn’t kind of clean, effective narrative, looking to embellish the scenes with as many props technically as the artist could. This is what the audience wanted. This is why Ghiberti won the competition back in 1401 and this is something that he’s still doing.

Okay, to the next scene, we have the Kiss of Judas, a scene that we’ve discussed several times now, and I think all of you remember that my favorite interpretation of this particular subject is the one produced by Giotto on the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Ghiberti’s is pretty good. This crowd of people… Judas is actually positioned dead center in the composition but leaning to the right hand side as he leans towards Jesus Christ to actually kiss him on the cheek, to identify him definitively as the person claiming to be the Messiah, that person claiming to be the King of the Jews and therefore guilty of course of blasphemy.

This then leads to the next panel to the right, where Jesus is bound to a column in the center of the scene and to either side of him a man with a whip or a flog and this is the flagellation. This is the whipping or the flogging of Jesus Christ, which again is a pretty standard subject to include in a passion cycle because this of course is part of that torment, part of that torturing that Pontius Pilate intended for Jesus Christ, and in fact, Pilate shows up in the next seat where the subject is the washing of the hands.

Now we’ve seen the washing of the hands in several works of art that we’ve discussed so far in this podcast series. The first that comes to mind is in Duccio’s Maestà, the backside of do chose Maestà, the passion cycle. We’ve talked about how essentially Pontius Pilate washing his hands represents the death sentence of Jesus Christ. That according to the Gospel of Matthew, which is particularly sympathetic to the Roman cause, the Roman governor of Palestine, this man named Pontius Pilate, found no fault with Jesus Christ, did not understand why he should have him executed, why the members of the Sanhedrin wanted him put to death.

So Pontius Pilate sort of alternative plan was to have Jesus beaten and mocked and humiliated, and then to present this broken figure of Jesus to the crowd, hoping that this would placate their thirst for blood. But instead of being satisfied with all he’d gone through the crowd continued to chant, “Crucify him, crucify him.” And according to the Gospel of Matthew, at this point, Pontius Pilate washes his hands. He said, “Fine, if you want them dead, we’ll kill him, but the blood is on your hands.” So that washing of the hands is essentially Pontius Pilate saying it is your responsibility that this man will die.

And Matthew’s response, or at least the response that he puts into the mouths of the people in the crowd, Pontius Pilate says the blood is on your hands, and the way the Jews respond is by saying, “Yes, his blood be on our hands and on the hands of our children.” And as I’ve repeated several times throughout these podcasts, this is really the beginning. This is the seed from which millennia of antisemitism has actually grown. It’s been perpetuated obviously through later Christian scholars as well, but it is here that essentially the Jews say yes, we’re the ones who put Jesus on the cross and that responsibility is a hereditary one. It passes onto our children as well.

From an historical perspective, Pontius Pilate, he had to be recalled. He was the most violent of Roman governors in the Eastern provinces, and it just got to the point where his butchery got so out of hand that even for the Romans it was too much. And so it’s curious to see how Christianity was beginning to market itself to a Roman audience, to a Gentile audience. If you remember, we’ll talk more about this in later podcasts, St. Paul in his philosophy of how Christianity should be proselytized, not to Jews, but to Gentiles instead.

And so of course, if you’re going to market this religion to a Roman audience, the last thing you want to do is to make the Romans out to be the bad guys. And so at this point, the shift instead blames to the Jews. But this is the stuff of many other podcasts when we get into the actual history of religion, of Christianity itself, and how in fact Christianity was nothing more at its very origins than a sect of Judaism.

Christians were Jews who simply believed that the Messiah had come in the person of Jesus Christ, and they respected the law. They circumcised their sons. They respected Passovers and what have you as well, so curious to see how things have actually changed over so long. And of course it’s kind of revision is history, but that image of Pontius Pilate washing his hands is perhaps one of the most poignant images that you can see in Christian art and is reflective of the kind of historical and sociological trend that had lasted a couple of thousand years.

Okay, up to the left, let’s continue on to where the top row, far left hand side, we have the carrying of the cross. Okay, so this is of course Jesus being led to his crucifixion and typical of Florentine art. Jesus Christ carries his own cross. We talked about this earlier in Sienese art. It is always Simon of Serene carrying the cross because that’s what the gospels say.

But in Florence where we have a tendency to focus more on Jesus’s human suffering, you actually see Jesus carrying the cross, and Ghiberti kind of supporting, Ghiberti kind of bearing witness to this Florentine tradition of Christ carrying his cross and his own interpretation, so not surprising that the next subject will be the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And again, in true Florentine fashion, it is a single execution. It is just Christ who is executed here, not in the company of the good and bad thieves.

Now again, this could be Ghiberti representing this Florentine tradition of single executions, or it could simply be a compositional limitation. He just couldn’t fit three crosses inside of this quatrefoil frame. It Was just too small and it would of course then force him to change the scale, so instead we see Christ crucified and isolated in his crucifixion in the particular scene.

Now the next scene is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, so after his execution, which is a crucifixion, we have the resurrection. And here we have an image of Jesus hovering above his empty Roman sarcophagus. And so again, a rather Western interpretation of the scene, Christ in this exaggerated C curve with his pendulum drapery and the sleeping soldiers down below.

And then the final scene on the upper right hand corner is instead the Pentecost, which of course 50 days after Jesus’s ascension, the Holy Spirit came down and baptized the Apostles with fire, giving them the gift of tongues. In other words, giving them the ability to speak all languages and to go out and to preach the good news to the world. This is the idea, and it’s kind of an interesting scene because there’s this architectural construct. You’ll see Mary in the scene of the… Theoretically, the gospels do not identify her as being present at the Pentecost. But in Florence, you usually do see her there and the apostles around her.

And then outside the building at the bottom on a larger scale, you’ll see figures dressed in exotic clothing, presumably to represent… It’s kind of a difficult thing from an artistic perspective to represent the Pentecost, because how do you show the apostles going out throughout the world, spreading the good news of Christ? Well, the way you do it is by having the world come to them, so it looks like the United nations kind of Security Council meeting or something with all these different figures and exotic dresses coming and standing outside, so the idea of how Christianity actually got the word out.

So we started with the annunciation down in the lower left, we complete the narrative with the Pentecost in the upper right hand corner. Now you may remember back to our discussion of the ornamentation of the baptistry that the first set of doors produced in the 14th century by Andrea Pizano represent scenes from the life of SJB, from Saint John the Baptist. Now we have the early 15th century doors by Ghiberti representing New Testament subject matter, the life of Jesus Christ.

And of course we have that third portal, which would need to be filled, and that portal would be filled by the Gates of Paradise, which would eventually take up the Eastern side. And not surprisingly, the subject matter of the Gates of Paradise would be Old Testament instead. So if you think about the decorative program of the Baptistry, it is one that is comprehensive, Old Testament, New Testament, and then of course, scenes from the life of the titular St. John the Baptist, to whom the structure is dedicated.

So in my next podcast, what we’ll do is continue with our discussion of international Gothic. In fact, we’ll complete our discussion of international Gothic art by looking at those paintings in the Uffizi Gallery collection, which best represent this style. And then after our discussion of international style art, we will then continue on with our discussion of Renaissance art. So this is really that transitional moment at the beginning of the 15th century where we have this kind of cohabitation between the remnant, at least in Italy, because the rest of Europe will continue with what we call Gothic for decades, which is why we call it the international Gothic style.

And in the central part of Italy and Florence in particular, instead we have the spark, we have that flame that would ignite a movement that would last for the next two and a half centuries, which is called the Renaissance. So stay tuned for more.

For more information on lectures and programs in the United States, art history tours in Italy and for online video lectures, visit RockyRuggerio.com.