[Illustration:  GHIBERTI’S COMPETITIVE PANEL]

Symonds considers the first gate a supreme accomplishment in bronze casting, but criticizes the other, and usually more admired gate, as “overstepping the limits that separate sculpture from painting,” by “massing together figures in multitudes at three and sometimes four distances.  He tried to make a place in bas-relief for perspective.”  Sir Joshua Reynolds finds fault with Ghiberti, also, for working at variance with the severity of sculptural treatment, by distributing small figures in a spacious landscape framework.  It was not really in accordance with the limitations of his material to treat a bronze casting as Ghiberti treated it, and his example has led many men of inferior genius astray, although there is no use in denying that Ghiberti himself was clever enough to defy the usual standards and rules.

Fonts were sometimes made in bronze.  There is such a one at Liege cast by Lambert Patras, which stands upon twelve oxen.  It is decorated with reliefs from the Gospels.  This artist, Patras, was a native of Dinant, and lived in the twelfth century.  The bronze font in Hildesheim is among the most interesting late Romanesque examples in Germany.  It is a large deep basin entirely covered with enrichment of Scriptural scenes, and is supported by four kneeling figures, typical of the four Rivers of Paradise.  The conical cover is also covered with Scriptural scenes, and surmounted by a foliate knob.  Among the figures with which the font is covered are the Cardinal Virtues, flanked by their patron saints.  Didron considers this a most important piece of bronze from an iconographic point of view theologically and poetically.  The archaic qualities of the figures are fascinating and sometimes diverting.  In the scene of the Baptism of Christ the water is positively trained to flow upwards in pyramidal form, in order to reach nearly to the waist, while at either side it recedes to the ground level again,—­it has an ingenuous and almost startling suddenness in the rising of its flood!  An interesting comment upon the prevalence of early national forms may be deduced, when one observes that on the table, at the Last Supper, there lies a perfectly shaped pretzel!

The great bronze column constructed by St. Bernward at Hildesheim has the Life of Christ represented in consecutive scenes in a spiral form, like those ornamenting the column of Trajan.  Down by Bernward’s grave there is a spring which is said to cure cripples and rheumatics.  Peasants visit Hildesheim on saints’ days in order to drink of it, and frequently, after one of these visitations, crutches are found abandoned near by.

Saxony was famous for its bronze founders, and work was sent forth, from this country, in the twelfth century, all over Europe.

[Illustration:  FONT AT HILDESHEIM, 12TH CENTURY]

Orcagna’s tabernacle at Or San Michele is, as Symonds has expressed it, “a monumental jewel,” and “an epitome of the minor arts of mediaeval Italy.”  On it one sees bas-relief carving, intaglios, statuettes, mosaic, the lapidary’s art in agate; enamels, and gilded glass, and yet all in good taste and harmony.  The sculpture is properly subordinated to the architectonic principle, and one can understand how it is not only the work of a goldsmith, but of a painter.