I figured he'd been waiting there the whole time. The Gates of Paradise are the famous fifteenth-century doors of the octagonal Baptistery of Saint John, crafted in bronze by Lorenzo Ghiberti over a fifty-year time span. Of course, the doors on display are copies, but the original masterpieces—believed by art historians, my humble self included, as heralding the beginning of the Renaissance due to their masterful work of perspective—those magnificent doors are now behind protective walls in the cathedral museum adjacent to the Baptistery. But no matter. One look at the copies was enough to take a person inside the vision as the images leapt out in a manner defining Renaissance art. This was the beginning use of the three-dimensional perspective, and Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise gave the art world its new sense of depth. At twenty-one when he began the commission, Ghiberti learned as he worked, producing tiles projecting a vanishing point where the lines in each image converged. Creative points in the designs were shortened because Ghiberti realized that doing so extenuated the depth of the scene and defined a distinct foreground, middle, and background.
