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| The Perception of Doors |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2007
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Originally published
in The Guardian
7 July 2007
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Florence used to be a place where publicly
commissioned sculpture could be seen in public, on the streets
and squares for which it had been made centuries earlier. The
famous exception was Michelangelo's David, which was replaced
long ago by a replica. But works by many other celebrated sculptors
- Ghiberti, Donatello, Verrocchio, Cellini, Giambologna - could
be seen on the sites for which they were designed.
The process by which they have gradually been
taken indoors for their protection is nothing new: a very long
time ago Michelangelo's Slaves used to be treated as garden
sculpture and were to be found in a grotto on the Boboli Gardens.
But the recent pressures on works in bronze and marble have
become ever greater, and you can't argue with the philosophy
that says we should act to preserve these masterpieces for future
generations.
Something vital, however, is being lost. When
I first visited Florence in the mid-1960s, the bronze doors
of the Baptistery stood intact, and you could approach them
at any time of day to admire them and to learn the paradigm
they offered of the development of Gothic into Renaissance.
You began on the south side with the Andrea Pisano doors. That
was Gothic. You went around to the north, to Ghiberti's first
set of doors, and that was your transition to the Renaissance.
Then the eastern doors, the so-called Gates of Paradise, represented
the thorough-going triumph of Renaissance values, leaving Gothic
behind for good.
This tradition of making bronze doors for ceremonial
buildings is very old indeed - it goes back directly to ancient
Rome, and links the earliest Christian art to our own era. There
is a bronze door in the baptistery of St John Lateran in Rome,
dating from the papacy of Saint Hilarius (461-468). You could
plan a very peculiar holiday looking at early Christian bronze
doors. It would take you as far north as Aachen, Mainz, Hildesheim
and Augsburg, as far east as Novgorod, and as far south as Palermo
and Monreale, with Verona (where you can increase your chances
of a pregnancy by touching the belly of one of the figures),
Pisa, Rome and Ravello among your other Italian destinations.
Florence would then seem like the culmination of that tradition
(although as I say there are many later bronze doors).
But don't rush to make this door-pilgrimage
now, as the Ghiberti Gates of Paradise are still under renovation,
and three of the panels are currently touring the United States
(visiting Atlanta, Chicago and New York), together with elements
from their exquisite frame. When these parts return to Florence,
they will be restored to their proper positions on the doors,
which will then be put on display in a hermetically sealed case
in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, we are told, "never
to travel again".
The doors are notable for their brilliant gilding,
but this is something they have not always revealed. In the
18th century, they would have looked dark and perhaps rather
dull, not just because of dirt but because they had been varnished
to tone them down. A very deliberate aesthetic had been at work,
from which bronzes to this day are only just recovering. In
the Renaissance, gilding or silvering was applied to bronze
to increase its splendour and to make certain parts (such as
the eyes, or some element of the armour) stand out. Later centuries
found this vulgar, and covered it over with varnish. When a
bronze is cleaned today, and found to be part-gilded or silvered,
this is generally an indication that it is a work of very high
quality. There is great excitement as a result.
In Florence in 1772, when the painter Anton
Raphael Mengs made a cast of Ghiberti's doors and realised they
were gilded, he called for them to be cleaned to reveal all
their details. But the request was refused, apparently on aesthetic
grounds. The interesting catalogue of the current American show
(The Gates of Paradise, Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece,
edited by Gary M Radke, Yale) quotes a contemporary explanation
for this refusal, which sets out the aesthetics in a nutshell:
"It would seem that some sculptures should be of a more
uniform colour, in order to best distinguish the play of light
and shadow and thus play up the actual relief. Thus drawings
are made preferably from plaster casts, rather than ancient
statues, which may have become soiled due to improper maintenance
by the antiquarian. Uniform patinas are considered appropriate
for reliefs in bronze. And if the Gates had been fashioned from
solid gold, which might be more beautiful to the eyes of a miser,
and in general more magnificent, this would not be satisfactory
for a draughtsman, since a bronze without a patina will be filled
with reflections and false lights which only confound one's
sight."
This tells you a great deal about the neo-classical
aesthetic: visibility was everything, which was why uniformity
was so desirable; pure white marble was the best; failing that,
a plaster cast was better to draw from than an antique, because
there were no distractions from the pure play of light and shadow,
line and form. A gold relief would be confusing because of its
excessive reflectivity, and because, by strong implication,
it represented the wrong kind of magnificence.
The Gates were only cleaned and repolished
after their replacement in situ at the end of the second world
war. Then it was that they began to show some of their splendour.
But the grime of the city soon supervened and obscured them
again. Then came the flood of 1966, which damaged some of the
panels and partially dislodged them from what turned out to
be (to the amazement of the restorers) the solid bronze structure
of the doors. And this damage was the prelude to a more recent
discovery - not, as one would imagine, that pollution was putting
the doors at risk, but that changes in the weather effect changes
in the bronze, which in turn have a blistering effect on the
gilt surface.
Next year, they will be back on display, visible,
in the sense of having a fully readable surface, but indoors,
and behind glass, and away from their ritual spot - opening
the way, on special days, from the Baptistery to the Cathedral.
This time, it has taken as long to restore them as it did to
make them in the first place. There will be a gain in one column,
and a loss to be marked in another column. But there is no sense
in measuring the loss against the gain.
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