The effigies of Richard II. and his queen, Anne of Bohemia, were made during the reign of the monarch; a contemporary document states that “Sir John Innocent paid another part of a certain indenture made between the King and Nicolas Broker and Geoffrey Prest, coppersmiths of London, for the making of two images, likenesses of the King and Queen, of copper and latten, gilded upon the said marble tomb.”

There are many examples of bronze gates in ecclesiastical architecture.  The gates of St. Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome were made in 1070, in Constantinople, by Stauracius the Founder.  Many authorities think that those at St. Mark’s in Venice were similarly produced.  The bronze doors in Rome are composed of fifty-four small designs, not in relief, but with the outlines of the subjects inlaid with silver.  The doors are in Byzantine taste.

The bronze doors at Hildesheim differ from nearly all other such portals, in the elemental principle of design.  Instead of being divided into small panels, they are simply blocked off into seven long horizontal compartments on each side, and then filled with a pictorial arrangement of separate figures; only three or four in each panel, widely spaced, and on a background of very low relief.  The figures are applied, at scattered distances apart, and are in unusually high modelling, in some cases being almost detached from the door.  The effect is curious and interesting rather than strictly beautiful, on the whole; but in detail many of the figures display rare power of plastic skill, proportion, and action.  They are, at any rate, very individual:  there are no other doors at all like them.  They are the work of Bishop Bernward.

Unquestionably, one of the greatest achievements in bronze of any age is the pair of gates by Lorenzo Ghiberti on the Baptistery in Florence.  Twenty-one years were devoted to their making, by Ghiberti and his assistants, with the stipulation that all figures in the design were to be personal work of the master, the assistants only attending to secondary details.  The doors were in place in April, 1424.

[Illustration:  BRUNELLESCHI’S COMPETITIVE PANEL]

The competition for the Baptistery doors reads like a romance, and is familiar to most people who know anything of historic art.  When the young Ghiberti heard that the competition was open to all, he determined to go to Florence and work for the prize; in his own words:  “When my friends wrote to me that the governors of the Baptistery were sending for masters whose skill in bronze working they wished to prove, and that from all Italian lands many maestri were coming, to place themselves in this strife of talent, I could no longer forbear, and asked leave of Sig.  Malatesta, who let me depart.”  The result of the competition is also given in Ghiberti’s words:  “The palm of victory was conceded to me by all judges, and by those who competed with me.  Universally all the glory was given to me without any exception.”