On Ghiberti’s workshop opposite S. Maria Nuova, in the Via Bufalini, the memorial tablet mentions Michelangelo’s praise—­that these doors were beautiful enough to be the Gates of Paradise.  After that what is an ordinary person to say?  That they are lovely is a commonplace.  But they are more.  They are so sensitive; bronze, the medium which Horace has called, by implication, the most durable of all, has become in Ghiberti’s hands almost as soft as wax and tender as flesh.  It does all he asks; it almost moves; every trace of sternness has vanished from it.  Nothing in plastic art that we have ever seen or shall see is more easy and ingratiating than these almost living pictures.

Before them there is steadily a little knot of admirers, and on Sundays you may always see country people explaining the panels to each other.  Every one has his favourite among these fascinating Biblical scenes, and mine are Cain and Abel, with the ploughing, and Abraham and Isaac, with its row of fir trees.  It has been explained by the purists that the sculptor stretched the bounds of plastic art too far and made bronze paint pictures; but most persons will agree to ignore that.  Of the charm of Ghiberti’s mind the border gives further evidence, with its fruits and foliage, birds and woodland creatures, so true to life, and here fixed for all time, so naturally, that if these animals should ever (as is not unlikely in Italy where every one has a gun and shoots at his pleasure) become extinct, they could be created again from these designs.

Ghiberti, who enjoyed great honour in his life and a considerable salary as joint architect of the dome with Brunelleschi, died three years after the completion of the second doors and was buried in S. Croce.  His place in Florentine art is unique and glorious.

The broken porphyry pillars by these second doors were a gift from Pisa to Florence in recognition of Florence’s watchfulness over Pisa while the Pisans were away subduing the Balearic islanders.

The bronze group over Ghiberti’s first doors, representing John the Baptist preaching between a Pharisee and a Levite, are the work (either alone or assisted by his master Leonardo da Vinci) of an interesting Florentine sculptor, Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1474-1554), who was remarkable among the artists of his time in being what we should call an amateur, having a competence of his own and the manners of a patron.  Placing himself under Verrocchio, he became closely attached to Leonardo, a fellow-pupil, and made him his model rather than the older man.  He took his art lightly, and lived, in Vasari’s phrase, “free from care,” having such beguilements as a tame menagerie (Leonardo, it will be remembered, loved animals too and had a habit of buying small caged birds in order to set them free), and two or three dining clubs, the members of which vied with each other in devising curious and exotic dishes.  Andrea del Sarto, for example, once brought as his