Monsignor Timothy Verdon lecture Gates of Paradise

Good evening, good evening. I'm Julián Sugasagoitia, the director and CEO of the Nelson-Atkins, and on behalf of Shirley Bush Helzberg, our board chair, our board, volunteers, and the staff of the Nelson, it is my honor to welcome all of you tonight to what is going to be a very special celebration. And isn't that time lapse that you are seeing amazing? It's incredible. And also, let me remind you, we are now on Facebook Live. One thing that I've noticed is that this auditorium is full, but also many people at home are watching this live stream, and then it will be recorded. And also the good thing is that people can comment. So I invite all of you to eventually look for the safe stream of Facebook, because it has all the comments. So how many of you do Facebook just show of hands? Fabulous. Okay, so you can see it at home or share it with friends. But I want to take this opportunity also to give a very special shout out to the incredible team that you saw on this video from the Belger company, who helped rig and install this piece, along with our museum-dedicated talented staff. It was an accomplishment that took many, many hours. It's great that we can condense it to exactly less than a minute. But let me tell you, everybody was shaking and shivering and holding their breath for the six hours that it took from going flat to going horizontal, and then anchoring it to our elevator shaft. And that is one of the few places where we could put these four and a half tons. So it is really, again, with all my thanks to Evelyn and Dick Belger for not only lending us their beautiful secret warehouse, but also a great team that helped us install this marvelous piece. But tonight what we're celebrating also, tonight we're celebrating two incredible Kansasitians, two people that have made this institution flourish. And I want to special thank Paul and Linda DeBruce for their most astonishing gift, the gift of the Gates of Paradise from Ghiberti. So please, would you please rise? And let me share in two minutes and 36 seconds, otherwise I would go for two hours, so they impose on me to be short, the backstory. And in order to keep myself on time, let us run that little video that you might also see on our Instagram accounts. Paul and Linda were traveling through Italy and spending some time in Florence. And as I said, they had a trip scheduled to go out of the city, but it happened to be a rainy day. And the fact that it was a rainy day, they changed their plan. They stayed in Florence, visiting galleries, and they stumbled upon the Friuli Gallery. Clara Marinelli starts engaging and said, well, if you really like sculpture, you should really go and see what we're doing to conserve and restore the doors of the Baptistery of Florence at our foundry. They got involved in this restoration process and supporting those doors. And today, the new doors, north doors, that you can see in Florence, were supported by the DeBruce's, and their name is even engraved in the back of the doors. And what began as a conversation, maybe we can display them one day in Kansas City, ended up being a beautiful gift that the DeBruce's are making for our city and our museum. Museums are built on the great shoulders of great titans for our community. And I think every generation has had amazing patrons that have taken this museum from our founders to the most recent ones, have always enhanced the standing of our city and the standing of our museum by our amazing gifts. And so when this appeared and it looked so impossible, improbable, that it began really as a joke. Mr. DeBruce saying, do you think you would want it? Of course we would want it. But it seems so improbable. And so it still is like a pinch moment. Like, really, they're here. I think there could not be a more beautiful, welcoming work of art to tell the story of a great institution as these two doors. A gift like this one is still magical and it is unbelievable. And what I think brings also joy is for so many people that will not have had the occasion of going to Florence, it is bringing Florence a little bit to Kansas City. So yes, still I am like, pinch me. Is this true that we have those amazing things? And it is every day a testament to magic and to connectivity. And I cannot believe that these gates are here. Now, the gates and that little video that you saw was filmed on a very cold winter day as the gates arrived to Kansas City on February, as we were also about to open the Henry Block Wing of Impressions Art. And it was serendipity and again, the temporal. But what you saw that day also, all of a sudden, Kansas City was brighter and warmer. And we were accompanied them. And in the video you see, as we are accompanied today by the Marinelli family that is intrinsic to this story. Their foundry in Florence produced our cast and the cast that is today in the facade of the baptistry in Florence. And also foretelling that one day we might have these gates here. Their foundry had already produced, about 60 years ago, sculptures that are to be seen today in the plaza. So we discovered that connection that the Marinelli foundry and the plaza were linked two years ago when we had the pleasure of welcoming Enrico Marinelli to Kansas City and start discussing this possibility. Tonight, I want to dedicate this presentation to the memory of Enrico Marinelli, whose passion for the conservation of Italian culture and heritage and the particular for his efforts in bringing to life the Museo del Duomo and conserving these incredible works of art are his everlasting legacy. A legacy that carries on with his family and the friends that he gathered around him and around his vision. And I want to recognize particularly tonight that we have here to us his family and would Gloria and Clara please raise and again an applause for them and everything they've done to make this happen. And on the occasion of this such outstanding gift, it is our great pleasure to welcome to Kansas City a very special guest who flew in from Florence to honor us with his presence, Monsignor Timothy Verdon. He is the director of the prize-winning new Opera del Duomo Museum in Florence, Italy, which I encourage everyone to visit. He's also the author of its innovative installation and we had such a pleasure discovering it and I know you'll see some of the images and we'll all want to book our flights immediately after. What most fascinates me about our conversations with Monsignor is he is a PhD art historian. He's graduated from the Yale schools, has many publications to his credit, but more importantly his passion for Florence and Florentine art led him to discover his inner calling and became ordained as a priest and is now in the canon of the Florence Cathedral, a Roman Catholic priest. And what we discussed last time we had dinner together in Florence and is that normally a priest that is ordained goes immediately into church and serves but he was given a special mission to use art history as what he was professed because art history conveys also the messages that were so important to the Florence Cathedral and in a way it is the best of two passions coming together and you will see in his speech how that comes to life. He has been of course a consultant to the Vatican Cultural Heritage Commission and a fellow of the Harvard University Center for the Renaissance Study which is a beautiful villa called Villa Itati in Florence, curator of major exhibitions in Italy and also in the United States and he has organized symposia all over and now he is teaching also at Stanford Florence program. Among his recent public lectures is a presentation at the United Nations Conference on Religious Tourism at Oxford University and the Catholic University of Paris and Strasbourg and now Nelson Adkins live from this stage. Please welcome and help me Monsignor Timothy Verdon. Thank you for that very warm welcome. Unfortunately this lecture unlike the wonderful time lapse that you saw cannot be collapsed into a minute but I'll read it in order to remain within the established time and also because the concepts are rich not to say at certain points complex and it's better to remain with the texts that are prepared. Let me say though thanks in a particular way to Julian for this occasion and for the museum. I was completely unprepared for the extraordinary beauty of your museum and I'm simply overwhelmed so it's a real joy to be here. According to the 16th century historian Giorgio Vasari it was Michelangelo who gave Lorenzo Ghiberti's masterpiece the name Door or Vasari says that standing in front of this work with a group of friends Michelangelo remarked they are so beautiful that they would look well at the gates of paradise. This was perhaps a play on words since Ghiberti's double door dominated the square between the baptistry and the facing cathedral and in Italian tradition the area between a baptistry and its related church was known as a paradise. The door that people see there today is a copy made by Aldo Marinelli in the 1990s when it was decided that the original then being restored perfectly sometimes I ask myself why I didn't study philosophy where with half an idea you can speak for six hours. With the history of art you really need all these machines. The door that people see on the baptistry today is a copy we said made by Aldo Marinelli in the 90s when it was decided that the original that you see here then being restored for reasons of conservation should not return to the piazza but be exhibited at the opera del duomo museum. Aldo Marinelli made a second copy as well which his son Enrico a Florentine businessman and graduate of Harvard Business School brought to India and Korea for exhibitions in the early 21st century. Enrico whose premature death in 2016 deeply grieved friends in all parts of the world was also the founder of an international association the guild of the dome which helps the opera del duomo the Florence Cathedral Foundation with its restoration projects and which two years ago realized for our baptistry a beautiful copy of Ghiberti's earlier door what we call the north door the original of which is also in our museum Julian mentioned that a moment ago. The second copy made of the door of paradise is now permanently in the Nelson Atkins museum thanks to the generosity of two members of Marinelli's guild of the dome Paul DeBruce and Linda Woods Mulder Bruce here this evening. Other guild members present this evening include Enrico Marinelli's widow Gloria and his daughter Clara both of whom you've met. Clara is the granddaughter of the man who cast the Nelson Atkins copy more than 25 years ago. The DeBruce's gift creates a bond between the Nelson Atkins and the museo del opera in Florence whose main room called sala del paradiso contains the original gates of paradise in the same room opposite the golden door we have reconstructed in one-to-one scale the cathedral facade as it appeared in the 15th century when Ghiberti's masterpiece was set in place facing it. The gates of paradise indeed are among the reasons for which we enlarged and dramatically redesigned the museum in 2012 to 2015. As has been said I am not only the director of the museum but the author of the installation project realized by the Florentine architects Adolfo Natalini, Piero Guicciardini and Marco Magni founded in 1891 the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo possesses the world's largest concentration of Florentine sculpture of the middle ages and renaissance. Statues and reliefs in marble bronze and precious metals by Arnolfo di Cambio, Andrea Pisano, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Luca and others. Almost all these works were made for exterior or interior areas of the ecclesiastical structures that stand in front of the museum. The baptistery of Saint John, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore known as the Duomo and Giotto's Campanile or bell tower. The Museo dell'Opera's unique mission is in fact to display works made for these buildings which constitute the first great project of what historians call the renaissance. For the first 120 years of the museum's life space limitations made it impossible to fulfill this task. In the course of time the barely two halls opened in 1891, I was very young, increased to 18 but these were still insufficient for the collection's hundreds of works the largest of which remained crated in warehouses. Worse yet the old rooms were too small for the works shown many of which are larger than life and meant to be seen from a distance. In the 1990s it became clear that still other works removed from the buildings for restoration would in future for conservation reasons have to be displayed in the museum which however lacked space. The most important of these new works that needed to be displayed was Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise. It was therefore with considerable relief that in 1997 the Opera del Duomo acquired a vast structure adjacent to the existing museum. Almost 10,000 square feet of space that could be added to the seven and a half thousand of the old museum. Erected as a theater in 1778 this building had served various purposes in the 19th century finally becoming a parking garage. Happily free of distinguishing architectural features which had been removed to make way for the cars the building could by Italian law be remodeled according to the purchaser's needs with no obligation to preserve anything more than its roofline. I was a member of the board of directors which authorized the purchase of the theater turned garage and was asked by the other members to develop an installation project for the more than double space that would result from the fusion of the new building with our existing one. I saw that the former theater's vast interior offered a chance to solve our thorniest problem. How to exhibit more than 120 fragments of the cathedral's lost facade dismantled in 1587. 60 statues many monumental in scale and another 60 architectural elements with carved decoration and mosaic inlet. Looking at the former theater's 110 foot length 60 foot height and 60 foot width I realized we could reconstruct virtually the whole facade which had never reached more than a third of its planned height and whose final form is known from a drawing made at the time of its disassembly in the 16th century of which drawing you see a detail here. The first hall of the new museum thus recreates the 14th century cathedral front putting our statues back in the positions indicated in the 16th century drawing and in the same hall Ghiberti's gates of paradise are installed just as they were in 1452 across from the main cathedral portal with its marble sculpture. The other two bronze baptistery doors occupy positions at right and left of the gates of paradise the earliest of the three Andrea Pisano's 14th century door is presently being restored and will come to us in 2019. Above the three doors stand groups of monumental 16th century statues made for these positions and the same hall also hosts two large roman sarcophagi known to have stood outside the baptistry throughout the middle ages and renaissance. Reuniting these works originally seen together but later separated our new installation reactivates the dialogue between antiquity the middle ages and the early and later renaissance that once made Florence famous. The gates of paradise are emblematic of this dialogue. The years in which they were realized 1425 to 52 were those in which Florence rediscovered Greco-Roman philosophy literature and art learning from antiquity to exalt the beauty and dignity of the human person. This new humanism in turn colored Lorenzo Ghiberti's interpretation of the bible stories he was called to illustrate stories which narrate the beginnings of human history using artistic languages derived from different cultures. Ghiberti that is expressed himself in universal terms reaching out to viewers at the deep level of shared humanity. His success in so doing explains the appeal his door still has for people from all over the world. The building for which the gates of paradise was made the baptistry of Saint John is a church in which children were and still are initiated into the christian faith. In the renaissance the baptistry was the only church in Florence in which this initiatory rite could be performed which means that everyone born in the city of christian parents received the sacrament there in practice almost the entire population. Ghiberti's door placed at the building's main entry was thus intended to speak of values that were first of all religious but also civic of the values that is that made people good christians and also good citizens. Conscious of this double didactic function Ghiberti made the gates of paradise more easily legible than his earlier door or than the still more ancient one by Andrea where those doors narrating respectively the life of christ and that of john the baptist tell their stories in 20 narrative reliefs plus eight emblematic ones in the lower tiers for a total of 28 small reliefs in curvilinear gothic frames and here at your right you see the schematic design of Ghiberti's earlier doors the gates of paradise his second set of doors for the baptistry reduce the narrative as you see there at your left to 10 stories in big reliefs whose size made it possible to illustrate multiple episodes developing personality exploring motivation and following the bible these 10 stories comprise a sequence that begins in the uppermost tier at the viewer's left then crosses to the right then descends to the next tier left then right and so on you see the reliefs numbered in their proper order in the schematic design practically speaking we read the left and right hand scenes of each level one two three four five six and so on as constituting a pair and each pair as a distinct stage in humankind's relationship with god a successive phase in the definition of men's and women's god-given dignity a new revelation of their unique value and thus also of the values that make human life with others possible the first pair of reliefs in the highest tier the most distant from the viewer celebrates the beginnings of the world and of human society the two stories regard at your left adam and eve and at your right to their children cain and abel and correspond to the opening pages of the bible from genesis 1 1 to genesis 4 16 in the first at your left a wealth of naturalistic detail translates the text's description of the newly created earth into image and the beauty of the first human creatures the man adam and the woman fashioned from his rib eve similarly expresses what the bible presents as the inherent dignity of these beings made in the image and likeness of divinity in the second scene the rustic hut before which we see adam and eve there at your left in the upper left hand corner the rustic hut and the children now with them speak of a capacity in human beings to create life and give it form a capacity that derives from the creator god in whose image the man and woman were made so to the different forms of life-sustaining work in which adam and eve's sons cain and abel engage speak of man's ability to put nature's resources to use and thus of the beginnings of culture the first value communicated by the doors is therefore that of the human condition endowed with beauty and creativity second only to that of god as you know neither of these stories had a happy ending adam and eve disobeyed god and were expelled from the earthly paradise he had prepared for them and cain jealous of the favor abel enjoyed in his relationship with god killed his brother and was reproached by god the real point of each story in effect is the failure of their merely human dignity to make these creatures happy the door after all was made for a baptistry and christian baptism is cleansing from sin which is precisely man's failure to realize his god-given potential significantly in each relief giberti puts the sinner in great evidence at the story's end in the lower right hand corner eve in the first scene beautiful and tragic as she realizes what her disobedience has wrought and cain in the second as he tells god that he is not his brother's keeper the second and greater value illustrated in these scenes is in fact the pathos of self-knowledge the awareness that despite its nobility and beauty our nature is flawed there is finally a third value implicit in these opening scenes which is human but also divine in the first relief adam and eve are not abandoned by the god who punishes their sin but clothed by him in order to face the harshness of their new existence and in similar fashion cain will not be abandoned but given a distinctive mark so that no one coming across him would kill him the third value is therefore value itself the worth the dearness the preciousness that in the judeo-christian view flawed human creatures still have for their creator who in fact abandons nothing he has made the reliefs of the second register recounting the stories of noah and his sons there at your left and of abraham and his son isaac build on this last value the worth that human creatures have for their creator the biblical source is again the book of genesis chapters 6 to 8 and 18 verses 1 to 15 and 22 1 to 19 in the first story god angered by human sinfulness and determined to destroy humankind has nonetheless saved noah a good man an upright man among his contemporaries a man who walked with god as genesis puts it noah and his sons had been taught to build a large boat for god's punishment would take the form of a devastating flood and this boat or ark was meant to save them and their wives and one pair of the animals and birds in creation the relief shows what happens after the flood has receded there you see the family and the animals some wild cats and a wonderfully peaceful looking cow there evil hasn't yet come back for a while in the second story a man whom god particularly loves abraham despite advanced age is promised the son he longs for some years later when abraham shows himself willing to offer this son in sacrifice if that be god's will he is told not to harm the boy and that all the nations on earth will bless themselves by your descendants because you have obeyed my command here is the angel staying abraham's hand before he can strike the fatal blow upon isaac his son the value that emerges in this pair of accounts is thus man's potential for winning god's respect god in fact establishes an alliance first with noah and then with abraham what the scriptures call a covenant in the first instance he commits himself to never again destroy the world by water and in the second to give abraham offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand upon the seashore the value is a relational worthiness in human beings that god acknowledges by forming an alliance with them the door's most important reliefs are perhaps those in the central third register the reliefs we've just looked at in the upper tiers are just too far from the viewer to be seen in all their beauty and when the door was still in place at the baptistry on important occasions the reliefs on the two lower levels were concealed by the crowd the middle tier this tier was thus the one that worked best and it was in fact there that giberti displayed his mastery of the new technical device of linear perspective it was there that in the original he placed his signature which you do not have in the copies and i think that's very correct and next to his signature the justifiable boast in latin a work made with wondrous skill you better you see did not sin by false modesty the stories at this level are left and right respectively that of isaac's sons esau and jacob and that of jacob's son joseph together with his brothers the biblical sources are again the value that emerges is divine favor given with no regard for human rules what in theological terms is called the mystery of individual election that is not a reference to donald esau and jacob were the twin sons of isaac and rebecca the first to emerge from his mother's womb was esau and by the tribal rules of the period his father's blessing was reserved for him but before they are born god tells the twins mother that the elder will serve the younger and years later she orchestrates an elaborate ruse to assure that her engaged husband indeed gives his patriarchal benediction to the second son jacob rather than to the first esau in the neighboring relief then a similar destiny awaits joseph a younger son of jacob whom his father loves above the others joseph's envious brothers sell him into slavery in egypt leading their father to believe he was killed by a wild beast but the bible says god was with joseph and everything he undertook was successful after many vicissitudes he became the egyptian king's trusted advisor and was able to help his own brothers in time of need pardoning their crime against himself in both cases that is god's particular favor always free never bound by human rules called forth similar freedom in its chosen object we'll return to this relief in particular later excuse me the other one he saw and the scenes in the lower tiers of the door of paradise are no longer from the first book of the bible and thus are by definition less universal regarding not all mankind but the limited group descended from jacob and jacob's sons the group known as the chosen people in the fourth tier from the top the second from the bottom at left giberti tells of this people's liberation from egypt when the welcome they had been given in joseph's day became oppression and god sent moses to lead them to a promised land during the chosen people's exodus on mount sinai god gave moses stone tablets with a written code of law 10 words or commandments while at the foot of the mountain the people reacted in terror to the thunder and lightning that accompanied god's self-manifestation the biblical sources exodus chapters 19 and 20. the right hand scene then recounts a later moment in the chosen people's journey from slavery toward freedom when after moses death his collaborator and successor joshua led the israelite masses across the jordan river into the land promised them by god where they captured a city blocking their advanced jericho here in the detail from that relief in the lower part of the screen you see the people of israel surrounding jericho sounding their trumpets and the walls and towers well and truly cracking the biblical sources joshua chapters 3 to 6 in both these events the value that emerges is the capacity of a social group to understand its destiny and to cooperate with it accepting the laws and the leaders provided by god the last pair of reliefs in the lowest of the five tiers tells of heroes of the chosen people david and his son solomon the left hand scene shows young david's defeat of the champion of his people's enemies the philistine giant goliath whom the boy is shown decapitating with goliath's own sword in that relief a bit to your left king sol in his chariot looks on he has already lost god's favor and his throne will pass one day to david the right hand scene develops the theme of kingship showing the sun there's david cutting off goliath's head the right hand scene develops the theme of kingship showing the son to whom david left his power solomon as he welcomes the queen of sheba come from her distant land to verify reports of solomon's wisdom everything she sees confirms what she has heard and the queen both blesses solomon and covers him with riches gold gems rare perfume sandalwood artifact the biblical sources of these stories are respectively the first book of samuel chapter 17 and the first book of kings chapter 10 giberti situates the meeting between king solomon and the queen of sheba in front of an enormous temple which in fact is an image of the interior of the florence cathedral at this lowest level of the door of paradise another essential feature of giberti's program becomes clear its allusion to christ king david is an ancestor of christ and his son solomon builder of god's temple in jerusalem similarly adumbritz christ who claimed he could in three days rebuild the temple if this were to be destroyed the value in these scenes is thus the chosen people's faith in those whom god established as their rulers and endowed with his wisdom david solomon and finally christ foreshadowed in david and solomon but so too adam the first man and abel and noah and abraham and isaac and moses all are mentioned in the new testament in relation to christ the choice of old testament stories for the gates of paradise was determined that is by typology the system in which a lesser personage or event is used to typify a greater in typological programs actors both play themselves and foreshadow a more universal figure in this case christ and time liquefies the past pointing to a future that is beyond time when giberti's door of paradise was still at the baptistry and was opened on great liturgical occasions those entering in fact moved through the old testament stories toward a colossal mosaic depicting christ on the western inner dome directly opposite the door the typological meaning of the doors was thus made evident giberti's chief innovation in the doors of paradise was his reduction of the originally intended 28 small panels to 10 larger ones as already noted in the artist's earlier door done between 14 3 and 14 24 what we call the north door giberti had shown eight emblematic figures in the lower t two tiers and 20 episodes of the life of christ so to the first program for his new doors the doors of paradise a program prepared by a learned humanist leonardo bruni called for 20 scenes depicting old testament stories as well as eight emblematic scenes and we must suppose that the patron the merchant's guild which paid for the doors was initially reluctant to sacrifice such narrative richness to the artist's preference for a simplified and new format the 10 scenes thus to satisfy the patron giberti developed an innovative narrative approach in which a single panel could include many episodes of its bible story increasing the events illustrated from the 21st plan to 41 despite the reduction of the number of panels from 20 to 10 this miracle is accomplished by a process of telescopic conflation where leonardo bruni's program for the doors of paradise narrated the opening pages of the bible in four separate panels for example god creating the heavens and earth god creating adam and eve adam and eve eating the forbidden fruit adam and eve expelled from paradise giberti told all these stories in a single scene instead of showing god in the act of creating the world he simply showed the lushness of nature as the context in which the almighty called to life first adam and then at the center from adam's side eve classically voluptuous here you see the scenes illustrated one is the creation of adam two is the creation of eve these two foreground episodes in high relief and legible from left to right as you would read a text are followed then by a third episode in high relief at the viewer's right which is not in sequence it is episode number four which shows the expulsion of adam and eve from paradise in which as you've already seen a still more sensual figure of eve dominates lifting her gaze to god against whom she has sinned the missing third episode the sin for which adam and eve are punished eating of the fruit of the tree which god had forgiven them is relegated to the middle ground of giberti's relief just above adam's creation and to our left of eves this pivotal event is in quite low relief what renaissance florentines called relievo stiacciato crushed relief which gives it a strangely parenthetical character as if the act of sinning were less important than the beauty of the sinners whom god first created and would later save sending his son christ to die for them in place of the symbolic choreography of giberti's earlier door in which essential figures in conventional poses telegraph theological messages here at your left you see the very beautiful annunciation scene from those earlier doors giberti now plunges viewers in the ebb and flow of history stressing plethoric detail and motivational complexity some of giberti's compositions are relatively simple and suggest temporal simultaneity his account of moses for example which moves from left to right showing the red sea recently traversed the israelite encampment realized after the crossing of the red sea those are the things you see at your far left and then the chosen people's assembly at the foot of mount sinai where they are terrified by the thunder and earthquake that denote god's presence finally in the upper right moses on the mountaintop receiving the tablets of the law from god very simple very straightforward other compositions extraordinarily complex recount events separated from each other by many years the story of eason jacob for example which covers the lives of these sons of isaac from before birth through their first maturity when the younger twin jacob by fraud obtains the paternal blessing traditionally reserved for the elder son giberti develops this account not in the left to right sequence customary and medieval painting but in an apparently random organization of the single episodes like a filmmaker leading viewers to mentally reconstruct a narrative through flashbacks he begins at number one on the roof of isaac's grand house where the patriarch's pregnant wife rebecca learns from god that she will bear twin boys who will be ever at war with each other it then moves to the other side of the relief number two where in the depths of the house rebecca appears in bed ready to give birth while in the foreground four women converse presumably of the difficulties and dangers of quiet bearing childbearing how she has thin hips and all of this sort of thing what women say to each other that men never learn the third episode then is inside the house at the center where the twins now young men strike a deal that is the dramatic crux of the story with esau the first born a hairy man and a hunter throwing his bow upon the pavement in disgust at his failure to find game these are the figures in the background not in the foreground of this detail while jacob the younger son by a few seconds a smooth-skinned home body subscribes to gourmet magazine agrees to give esau of the stew he has prepared in exchange for the elder's birthright the privilege that is of receiving their father's blessing the story then returns to the foreground with at center esau the hairy man looking terribly elegant straight from the hairdressers there esau summoned by his elderly father and commanded to go hunting you see the dogs ready and then to prepare a dish which the old man blind and near death will consume before he gives his firstborn the promised blessing the last three episodes are grouped at our right esau obediently setting out for the hunt it's the scene you see midway up the height of the detail at your far right esau trekking out into the woods rebecca then under the arcade explaining to the younger twin uh jacob her favorite how they will deceive old isaac and finally in the foreground the deception itself in which jacob feigning to be esau receives isaac's benediction while rebecca looks on in satisfaction who knows how many slights she is paying off with this in a left to right reading reading rebecca is logically the last figure one sees but also less logically she was the first for the scene of her dialogue with god on the roof terrace is right above her standing figure in the lower right hand corner of the relief the two are connected because in the original dialogue god had told her that the outcome of the conflict between her sons would be the elder's subordination to the younger and that story's end she is satisfied not only because she prefers jacob but because her stratagem has fulfilled god's prophecy giberti told the bible story fully that is to listeners or rather viewers familiar with its details who could navigate in the seeming disorder of his arrangement of the episodes he imposed a kind of higher order through the rational perspective pavement and the classical beauty of the house which encompassing practically all the figures becomes a unifying symbol the house of isaac through which the blessing given by god to abraham isaac's father would be passed on to isaac's son jacob and to his descendants one of whom is jesus christ the only figures outside the house are esau as he goes off to the hunt from which he will return to see himself excluded and rebecca the plotter in the context of 15th century italian art this was a revolutionary narrative technique rather than aligning the episodes from left to right as if they constituted a continuum giberti emphasized the unconnectedness of these events their autonomous and random dimension which only the mystic order of god's larger plan symbolized by the house and perspective pavement brings together in unity god's larger plan in christian belief is christ whose image we said is revealed inside the baptistry not on its exterior much as in history and in individual life the sense of apparently unrelated events becomes legible only in time only at life's end or after for sense here we might use the greek word logos logic word structuring articulation remembering that the original greek text of the new testament calls christ the logos the structuring word made flesh let me add a word on the influence of giberti's gates this early 15th century artist's innovative storytelling method was adopted by the later 15th century florentine painter sandro botticelli whose frescoes in the sistine chapel exploit the disparate harmony of non-sequential apparently random narration in the stories of moses on the south wall for example botticelli opens his visual account with the third of the six episodes illustrated in the life of moses which like the gossiping women in the foreground of giberti's esau and jacob relief is actually marginal to the story's point yet this scene the daughters of reuel the priest of madian at the well becomes the visual center of botticelli's narration with the other episodes the murder of the egyptian the flight from egypt the vision of the burning bush and the chosen people's exodus from egypt unraveling from right to left all around it at the center of the very beautiful figure of the young women at the well or again in his fresco on the north wall of the sistine chapel the temptations of christ botticelli tells the assigned stories three episodes depicting the savior's meetings with satan in the background at left and right of a much more developed foreground scene showing a ritual sacrifice in the jerusalem temple the gospel account of the temptations includes a passing mention of the temple from whose pinnacle satan urges christ to fling himself but says nothing of the elaborate rites performed therein which here become the central image just so in his stories of joseph for the gates of paradise giberti has dedicated most of the foreground to a coliseum like granary which is never really mentioned in the bible the upper part of the relief shows joseph taken from the well to be sold to the merchants and the lower left has in the foreground the story of the silver cup being found in benjamin's sack and then on a platform in that splendid building right above on your left hand though joseph embracing benjamin and pardoning the other brothers another instance of the influence of giberti's door on a florentine artist trained in the 15th century is the early 16th century design invented for the sistine ceiling by michelangelo bonarotti the peculiar organization of the ceilings curved plane into central narrative rectangles the genesis stories that constitute the ceiling's main axis flanked by figures of single prophets and sibyls in architectural niches and framed by nude youths evoking the pagan world in fact derives from giberti's doors in which the rectangular reliefs with bible stores the stories are surrounded by an ornate frame with niches containing statuettes of biblical heroes and heroines alternating with the ideal heads uh al'antica shown in the roundels if vasari is right in attributing to michelangelo the claim that giberti's doors were worthy to be called the gates of paradise then the later master both knew and admired the earlier ones masterpiece and we should remember that michelangelo's first teacher in the art of painting dominico girandaio like botticelli had worked in the sistine chapel in the 1480s in any case where else would a florentine turn for help in organizing so complex a program as that of the ceiling if not to lorenzo giberti's door in whose 10 large reliefs 41 narrative episodes unfold surrounded by 24 statuettes and 22 ideal heads in addition to giberti and his son vittoria's self-portraits truly giberti's phrase mira arte fabricatum was if anything a modest assessment of what he had done this evening i would like to apply the meaning of that phrase uh a work done with wondrous skill not only to giberti's original doors and to the marinelli cast of the doors now at the nelson atkins museum but in a very particular way to the enlightened generosity of paul and linda debruce a work done with wondrous skill thank you