The facade of Orvieto was the final achievement of the first or architectural period of Italian sculpture.  Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Orcagna, formed the transition to the second period.  To find one characteristic title for the style of the fifteenth century is not easy, since it was marked by many distinct peculiarities.  If, however, we choose to call it pictorial, we shall sufficiently mark the quality of some eminent masters, and keep in view the supremacy of painting at this epoch.  A great public enterprise at Florence brings together in honourable rivalry the chief craftsmen of the new age, and marks the advent of the Renaissance.  When the Signory, in concert with the Arte de’ Mercanti, decided to complete the bronze gates of the Baptistery in the first year of the fifteenth century, they issued a manifesto inviting the sculptors of Italy to prepare designs for competition.  Their call was answered by Giacomo della Quercia of Siena, by Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo di Cino Ghiberti of Florence, and by two other Tuscan artists of less note.  The young Donatello, aged sixteen, is said to have been consulted as to the rival merits of the proofs submitted to the judges.  Thus the four great masters of Tuscan art in its prime met before the Florentine Baptistery.[80] Giacomo della Quercia was excluded from the competition at an early stage; but the umpires wavered long between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, until the latter, with notable generosity, feeling the superiority of his rival, and conscious perhaps that his own laurels were to be gathered in the field of architecture, withdrew his claim.  In 1403, Ghiberti received the commission for the first of the two remaining gates.  He afterwards obtained the second; and as they were not finished until 1452, the better part of his lifetime was spent upon them.  He received in all a sum of 30,798 golden florins for his labour and the cost of the material employed.

The trial-pieces prepared by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti are now preserved in the Bargello.[81] Their subject is the “Sacrifice of Isaac;” and a comparison of the two leaves no doubt of Ghiberti’s superiority.  The faults of Brunelleschi’s model are want of repose and absence of composition.  Abraham rushes in a frenzy of murderous agitation at his son, who writhes beneath the knife already at his throat.  The angel swoops from heaven with extended arms, reaching forth one hand to show the ram to Abraham, and clasping the patriarch’s wrist with the other.  The ram meanwhile is scratching his nose with his near hind leg; one of the servants is taking a thorn from his foot, while the other fills a cup from the stream at which the ass is drinking.  Thus each figure has a separate uneasy action.  Those critics who contend that the unrest of sixteenth-century sculpture was due to changes in artistic and religious feeling wrought by the Renaissance, would do well to examine this plate, and see how much account must be taken of the artist’s temperament in forming their