berti's practice of distributing figures on a small
scale in spacious landscape framework was at variance with the severity of
sculptural treatment. The pernicious effect of his example may be traced
in much Florentine work of the mid Renaissance period which passed for
supremely clever when it was produced. What the unique genius of Ghiberti
made not merely pardonable but even admirable, became under other hands no
less repulsive than the transference of pictorial effects to painted
glass.[85]

That Ghiberti was not a great sculptor of statues is proved by his work at
Orsammichele. He was no architect, as we know from his incompetence to do
more than impede Brunelleschi in the building of the dome. He came into
the world to create a new and inimitable style of hybrid beauty in those
gates of Paradise. His susceptibility to the first influences of the
classical revival deserves notice here, since it shows to what an extent a
devotee of Greek art in the fifteenth century could worship the relics of
antiquity without passing over into imitation. When the "Hermaphrodite"
was discovered in the vineyard of S. Celso, Ghiberti's admiration found
vent in exclamations like the following: "No tongue could describe the
learning and art displayed in it, or do justice to its masterly style."
Another antique, found near Florence, must, he conjectures, have been
hidden out of harm's way by "some gentle spirit in the early days of
Christianity." "The touch only," he adds, "can discover its beauties,
which escape the sense of sight in any light."[86] It would be impossible
to express a reverential love of ancient art more tenderly than is done in
these sentences. So intense was Ghiberti's passion for the Greeks, that he
rejected Christian chronology and reckoned by Olympiads--a system that has
thrown obscurity over his otherwise precious notes of Tuscan artists. In
spite of this devotion, he never appears to have set himself consciously
to reproduce the style of Greek sculpture, or to have set forth Hellenic
ideas. He remained unaffectedly natural, and in a true sense Christian.
The paganism of the Renaissance is a phrase with no more meaning for him
than for that still more delicate Florentine spirit, Luca della Robbia;
and if his works are classical, they are so only in Goethe's sense, when
he pronounced, "the point is for a work to be thoroughly good, and then it
is sure to be classical."

One great advantage of the early days of the