The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert Page B

the reliefs were as perfect as he could make them, exasperating his assistants by his exhausting, relentless, wearisome striving ‘to imitate nature to the utmost’. After twenty-two years’ work the doors were finished at last; and, in celebration of so important an event, the
Priori
came out in procession from the Palazzo della Signoria – an exodus permitted them only upon the most solemn occasions – to pay their respects to the artist and his great work. 4 No sooner was the ceremony over, however, than Ghiberti returned to his foundry in the Via Bufalini opposite the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, 5 and immediately began to work on another set of doors for the eastern front of the Baptistery. He settled down to his task with that same determination to produce an unsurpassable masterpiece as he had brought to the earlier commission. After a further twenty-eight years’ work, a frail old man close to death, he was forced reluctantly to conclude that he could make no further improvement. The gilded bronze panels, representing scenes from stories in the Old Testament, were mounted at last, in 1456, in the eastern door of the Baptistery where Michelangelo was later to stand transfixed in wonderment before them and to declare that they were ‘fit to be the gates of Paradise’. 6
    Giovanni de’ Medici, himself an old man even before Ghiberti’s first doors were finished, had by then, together with his son, Cosimo, arranged for the Baptistery to be provided with another masterpiece, the monument to his friend, Pope John XXIII. 7 He had also concerned himself with the building and endowing of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, a hospital for the foundlings of Florence built for the
Arte di Por Santa Maria
, 8 and with the restoration and enlargement of San Lorenzo which, consecrated by St Ambrose in 393, was now falling into ruins. Eight of the leading men of the parish of San Lorenzo agreed to pay for the building of a family chapel, Giovanni undertaking to pay not only for a Medici chapel but also for the sacristy. This work, as also the Ospedale degli Innocenti, was entrusted to Brunelleschi, who had now returned from Rome anxious to display his newly acquired talents and to show Ghiberti how much more there was to art than the casting of bronze panels. His church of SanLorenzo, which became the family church of the Medici and was later to be enriched with their tombs, is one of the masterpieces of the early Renaissance. 9
    Brunelleschi’s most important commission, however, was to provide the massive dome for the cathedral. Men had almost despaired of this ever being done, since the space to be crowned – 138 feet in diameter – was so great. But Brunelleschi, who had made a careful study of the Pantheon and other buildings in Rome, insisted that it could be executed perfectly well and without scaffolding. The committee appointed by the Masons’ guild to consider the problem were highly sceptical, particularly as Brunelleschi, petulant and ill-tempered as always, declined to explain to them how he intended to set about the task, insisting that the matter must be left entirely in his hands and that no board of untrained busybodies should be given the opportunity of interfering with his design. The story is told that at one of the committee’s inconclusive meetings, Brunelleschi produced an egg, announcing that only he knew how to make it stand on its end: when all the others had confessed their failure to do so, he cracked its top on the table and left it standing there. ‘But we could all have done that,’ they protested. ‘Yes,’ replied Brunelleschi crossly, ‘and you would say just that if I told you how I propose to build the dome.’ On a later occasion Brunelleschi became so obstreperous that the committee gave orders for him to be forcibly removed from their presence. Attendants seized him, carried him out of the palace and dropped him on his back in the Piazza. Thereafter people pointed him out to each