t all; for while Ghiberti was at
work with his assistants on these north doors, between 1403 and 1424,
the place which they occupy was filled by those executed seventy years
earlier by Andrea Pisano (1270-1348), possibly from Giotto's designs,
which are now at the south entrance, opposite the charming little
loggia at the corner of the Via Calzaioli, called the Bigallo. These
represent twenty scenes in the life of S. John the Baptist, and below
them are eight figures of cardinal and Christian virtues, and they
employed their sculptor from 1330 to 1336. They have three claims to
notice: as being admirably simple and vigorous in themselves; as having
influenced all later workers in this medium, and particularly Ghiberti
and Donatello; and as being the bronze work of the sculptor of certain
of the stone scenes round the base of Giotto's campanile. The panel
in which the Baptist is seen up to his waist in the water is surely
the very last word in audacity in bronze. Ghiberti was charged with
making bronze do things that it was ill fitted for; but I do not know
that even he moulded water--and transparent water--from it.

The year 1399 is one of the most notable in the history of modern art,
since it was then that the competition for the Baptistery gates was
made public, this announcement being the spring from which many rivers
flowed. In that year Lorenzo Ghiberti, a young goldsmith assisting
his father, was twenty-one, and Filippo Brunelleschi, another
goldsmith, was twenty-two, while Giotto had been dead sixty-three
years and the impulse he had given to painting had almost worked
itself out. The new doors were to be of the same shape and size as
those by Andrea Pisano, which were already getting on for seventy
years old, and candidates were invited to make a specimen relief to
scale, representing the interrupted sacrifice of Isaac, although
the subject-matter of the doors was to be the Life of S. John the
Baptist. Among the judges was that Florentine banker whose name
was beginning to be known in the city as a synonym for philanthropy,
enlightenment, and sagacity, Giovanni de' Medici. In 1401 the specimens
were ready, and after much deliberation as to which was the better,
Ghiberti's or Brunelleschi's--assisted, some say, by Brunelleschi's
own advice in favour of his rival--the award was given to Ghiberti,
and he was instructed to proceed with his task; while Brunelleschi,
as we have seen, being a man of determined ambitio