Florence's Gate of Paradise

I remember going to Italy right after I finished my MBBS exams with Johnathon. One of the places I went to was Florence. The beautiful Duomo (cathedral) in Florence was a place I will always remember, as I had climbed up its double dome to the top, where a fantastic view of Florence lay before us.

CNN reported 28 Apr that the conservation effort of 3 panels on the doors of the Baptistery of the Duomo (now known as the "Gates of Paradise") is coming to a close after 25 years -- just two years less than it took to make the work itself. The doors, with 10 gilt panels are twenty feet tall and weigh three tons. This single work is considered the gateway to the Italian Renaissance, an upheaval so fundamental to how we see our world and think of ourselves that centuries later no Western culture is left untouched by it.

Legend has it that Michelangelo himself is the one who dubbed these doors the "Gates of Paradise." The 3 panels -- depicting the biblical stories of "Adam and Eve", "Jacob and Esau", and "David and Goliath" -- will be moved back to Florence to be reassembled in the original doorway for permanent, hermetically sealed display at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo after completing a tour at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta Georgia, the Chicago Institute of Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Exhibition curator Gary Radke of Syracuse University says that the special alloy of bronze developed in the 15th-century workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti for the doors had resulted in a corrosion that had dulled the dull surfaces of the square relief-sculptures and other gilt ornaments on the doors. The danger in trying to reclaim such works, of course, is that chemical treatments can damage the bond between the gold and bronze and take away more priceless, irreplaceable material.

So it's thanks to a specially developed laser-and-distilled-water technique that what you now can see on display is not a restoration -- not new gold leaf added, or reconstructed bronze modeling -- but the same metals Ghiberti worked with himself.

Ghiberti is, in a way, the artist behind the masters. Born in 1378, he won a competition to create the north doors of the Baptistery at a time when Radke says Florence was spending more money on its cultural expansion than its military endeavors. By the time that commission had led to the "Gates of Paradise" job, Ghiberti's workshop had become the place in which Donatello, Masolino, Uccello and other key artists of the era would be trained. Ghiberti died in 1455 -- 20 years before the birth of Michelangelo.