From Arthur Lubow’s excellent piece on Lorenzo Ghiberti’s ‘Gates of Paradise’:
Then there is the fascinating ‘Joshua’ panel, which remains in Florence. To portray the crumbling of Jericho’s walls before Joshua’s army, Ghiberti incised deep cracks in the fortifications. Cracks! Along with holes, cracks would be the bronze artist’s greatest fear. Only a man like Ghiberti, who rose immediately to the summit of his profession and stayed there, would be so insouciant as to simulate dreaded cracks in his bronze casting.
The ‘Gates of Paradise’ will be touring the United States through next April. Ghiberti’s masterpiece, one of Western civilization’s greatest artistic treasures, got its name, according to Lubow, from Michelangelo. Michelangelo said that the bronze doors to the Baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence were so beautiful, they resembled the gates to Paradise. “The phrase stuck,” Lubow writes, “for reasons that anyone who has seen them will understand.” You can read Garry Wills on Ghiberti here.
