Ghiberti's Door Panels at the High

Nothing like waiting until almost the last minute. Since last Fall we have been planning to get ourselves to the High Museum to see pieces that are on loan from the Lourve. Cornflower has studied Lorenzo Ghiberti's work last year knowing that some of the panels from the eastern door of the Baptistery in Florence, Italy were on display. We must catch this exhibit before it moved on to Chicago in the middle of July!!

So with scarcely a week between us and the departure date, we headed to the High after Church on a Sunday morning. Despite what Cornflower had learned about Ghiberti and the doors he designed, nothing could have prepare us for the true artistry and vision that it took to create the panels which decorated these massive doors.



The Battistero di San Giovanni (Baptistery of St. John) is an eight sided building just west of the Cathedral in Florence, Italy best known as the Duomo. The baptistery has bronze double doors on three sides. The museum exhibit of three out of ten of the panels from the eastern doors designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti was well worth the wait and made us glad we got to see it before it left.





The Museum did a fabulous job with its display. It included:
a life-size color print of the doors on a wall
(which gave us an appreciation of the size of the full doors),

the three panels encased in climate controlled glass
(which allowed us to see the panels from the front AND back to note the way that the high, middle and low relief method was employed),


a very detailed wall timeline of the conception, design, construction and history of the doors (which gave us a hint of the complexity of the multi-step process of restoring the doors after the years of weathering and floods damaged them).

Overall, the exhibit was both educational and impressive. Cornflower realized with awe that the door panels once they left the High would travel to Chicago and then return to Italy to be reunited with the rest of the door and then never again travel abroad. "Wow, Mom. The only way I could ever see it again is to go to Italy and that is the only way my kids or grandkids would ever see it!

If the exhibit should come your way, it is worth the visit!