Lorenzo Ghiberti
Joshua and Jericho, from Gates of Paradise, 1425–52, Gilded bronze, The Baptistry, Florence; Azoor Photo / Alamy Stock Photo
Gossamer Walls
Commentary by Scott Nethersole and Ben Quash
Lorenzo Ghiberti, along with his patrons and advisors, condensed the book of Joshua into two scenes: the crossing of the Jordan with the carrying of twelve stones from its bed (Joshua 4), and the fall of Jericho (Joshua 6). Both are represented on the set of gilt-bronze doors that Ghiberti made for the Baptistery in Florence.
The Old Testament cycle on these so-called ‘Gates of Paradise’ balanced the New Testament cycle on the North Doors (also by Ghiberti) and Andrea Pisano’s life of John the Baptist on the South Doors (as befitted a baptistery). Each of the ten panels tells an entire story though multiple vignettes, as if a ‘chapter’ (Krautheimer 1956: 175).
Compositionally, the two scenes from Joshua are clearly distinguished. The lower, and earlier, episode of the river-crossing is in higher relief. The rocky bed of the Jordan then leads the eye upwards to the second episode at Jericho, whose identity is clearly labelled on the walls (‘GERICO’). This moment is in lower relief, separated from the events beneath it by a coppice of trees and the Israelite encampment.
Jericho’s towers have already begun to tumble and great fissures have opened within the walls themselves. Unlike the hefty rocks in high relief in the foreground, these fragile stone structures are little more than incised lines on the plane of the panel.
They invert the logic of sculpture itself, for those rocks which most approximate untouched nature are, in fact, those which have been most prominently cast—‘built up’ by the artist, not carved away. Meanwhile, the linear forms of the humanly ‘built-up’ city walls are, paradoxically, created by a process of incision.
Such inversions can be read as an appropriate counterpart to the Joshua narrative’s catalogue of changes of fortune, shifts of power, and reversals of the expected, concentrated above all in a fortified city brought down by priests rather than men-of-arms (though men-of-arms soon play their bloody role). Stones are split asunder by the rituals of worship, as powerless as gossamer to defend those they shelter. No surprise that Christian commentators have made christological points from such inversions:
[W]herever Christ is with us, a web is a wall; for the person without Christ, a wall will become a web. (Paulinus of Nola, Poem 16.129)
But a darker paradox also lurks here as an indelible mark is made on history by an act of wiping out.
References
Krautheimer, Richard. 1956. Lorenzo Ghiberti, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
Radke, Gary. M. (ed.). 2007. The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece (Atlanta: Yale University Press)
Walsh, P. G. (trans.). 1975. The Poems of St Paulinus of Nola, ACW 40 (Mahwah: Paulist Press)
