Two other memorable works of Della Quercia must be parenthetically mentioned.  These are the Fonte Gaja on the public square of Siena, now unhappily restored, and the portrait of Ilaria del Carretto on her tomb in the cathedral of Lucca.  The latter has long been dear to English students of Italian art through words inimitable for their strength of sympathetic criticism.[83]

Ghiberti was brought up as a goldsmith by his stepfather, and it is said that while a youth he spent much of his leisure in modelling portraits and casting imitations of antique gems and coins for his friends.  At the same time he practised painting.  We find him employed in decorating a palace at Rimini for Carlo Malatesta, when his stepfather recalled him to Florence, in order that he might compete for the gate of the Baptistery.  It is probable that from this early training Ghiberti derived the delicacy of style and smoothness of execution that are reckoned among the chief merits of his work.  He also developed a manner more pictorial than sculpturesque, which justifies our calling him a painter in bronze.  When Sir Joshua Reynolds remarked, “Ghiberti’s landscape and buildings occupied so large a portion of the compartments, that the figures remained but secondary objects,"[84] his criticism might fairly have been taxed with some injustice even to the second of the two gates.  Yet, though exaggerated in severity, his words convey a truth important for the understanding of this period of Italian art.

The first gate may be cited as the supreme achievement of bronze-casting in the Tuscan prime.  In the second, by the introduction of elaborate landscapes and the massing together of figures arranged in multitudes at three and sometimes four distances, Ghiberti overstepped the limits that separate sculpture from painting.  Having learned perspective from Brunelleschi, he was eager to apply this new science to his own craft, not discerning that it has no place in noble bas-relief.  He therefore abandoned the classical and the early Tuscan tradition, whereby reliefs, whether high or low, are strictly restrained to figures arranged in line or grouped together without accessories.  Instead of painting frescoes, he set himself to model in bronze whole compositions that might have been expressed with propriety in colour.  The point of Sir Joshua’s criticism, therefore, is that Ghiberti’s practice of distributing figures on a small scale in spacious landscape framework was at variance with the severity of sculptural treatment.  The pernicious effect of his example may be traced in much Florentine work of the mid Renaissance period which passed for supremely clever when it was produced.  What the unique genius of Ghiberti made not merely pardonable but even admirable, became under other hands no less repulsive than the transference of pictorial effects to painted glass.[85]