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Our first trip to Italy was transformational. Art, history, adventure, and trauma (lost luggage) combined to leave a lasting impression and a strong desire to return.
While in Florence, we stayed at the Hotel De Lansi. It provided a comfortable home base with easy walking to many of the pictures we had seen in our art history books while in college. Carolynn was a walking encyclopedia of insight and information about the Renaissance and it's cast of characters. One of our favorite walks was looking for the weird and unusual doors of Florence.
We started with the famous bronze doors that Michelangelo called “The Gates of Paradise”. They had three dimensional relief sculptures by Lorenzo Ghiberti and are considered the most important event in Florentine art in the first 25 years of the 15th Century. They are located on the Baptistery of Saint John across from the Duomo. The originals are in the Duomo Museum for preservation, but the reproductions give you the idea why these panels help spark the Renaissance. Ghiberti applied the recently rediscovered principles of perspective to give depth to the panels representing scenes from the Bible. He used different techniques from incised lines to free standing figure sculpture within the panels. This gave a further depth to the scene. He considered it “the most singular work that I have ever made”.
The Florence Baptistery is one of the oldest buildings in the city built from 1059 until 1128. It has 3 sets of artistically important bronze doors. The East and North doors were made by Ghiberti and the South doors by Andrea Pisano.
After inspecting the historic doors around the Duomo, we wandered off looking for other unusual or weird doors and doorknobs. We saw lions, lambs, Madonna’s, and other Family Crests. Exquisite carved wooden doors with exotic knockers were everywhere.
April 20, 2023
