Discuss the artistic and political significance of Ghiberti’s winning design for the Baptistery doors

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1. Ghiberti meant to follow the lead of the ancients in creating realistic figures in realistic space. Not only do the figures farther off appear smaller, they also decrease in their projection from the panel, so that the most remote ones are in very shallow relief, hardly raised above the gilded bronze surface. Whereas medieval artists regarded the natural world as an imperfect reflection of the divine, and hardly worth attention, Renaissance artists understood the physical universe as an expression of the divine and thus worth copying in the greatest detail. To understand nature was, in some sense, to understand God. Ghiberti’s panel embodies this growing desire in the Renaissance to reflect nature as accurately as possible. This provided a major motivation for the development of perspective in painting and drawing.
2. The work had political significance as well. The only panel to represent a single event in its space is the Meeting of Solomon and Sheba. The carefully realized symmetry of the architecture, with Solomon and Sheba framed in the middle of its space, was probably designed to represent the much-hoped-for reunification of the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic branches of the Church. Solomon was traditionally associated with the Western Church, while the figure of Sheba, queen of the Arabian state of Sheba, was meant to symbolize the Eastern. Cosimo de’ Medici would finance a Council of Churches that convened in Florence in 1438, and as Ghiberti finished the doors a year earlier, it seemed possible that reunification might become a reality. This would have restored symmetry and balance to a divided Church just as Ghiberti had achieved balance and symmetry in his art.