It was in the fifteenth century that sculpture attained its highest standpoint. Foremost among the artists of this “golden age,” as it has been called, is Lorenzo Ghiberti, the Florentine. The latter was first brought into prominence in 1401, when leading men of Florence offered a prize for the best design for a bronze folding door to be used in the baptistery of San Giovanni. Each artist was allowed a year to complete the test panel, the subject of the design of which was to be the “Sacrifice of Isaac,” and the work was to be a bas-relief. Ghiberti was declared the victor, even by his most famous rivals, Donatello and Brunelleschi. For twenty-one years he labored at his doors, and at the end of that time was entrusted with another. The latter occupied him nearly as long as the first, and was even superior, Michael Angelo declaring it worthy to be the gate of paradise. While busy at the gate of the baptistery, Ghiberti executed three bronze statues of St. John the Baptist, St. Matthew, and St. Stephen, and a bronze sarcophagus of St. Zenobius. Donatello has been mentioned as a rival of Ghiberti in the contest for the door: he deserves mention as one of the most faithful followers of nature during this period. He even carried his naturalism to excess, copying the deformed, the horrible, and the grotesque. There are, however, several fine statues by him in San Michele. Among these are the statues of St. Peter and St. Mark, in niches on the outside, and a fine statue of St. George. The first equestrian statue of modern art was by Donatello, and is at Padua.
Lucca del Robbia lived at the same time, and his name is associated with the beautiful terra-cottas found in such quantities in the churches of Florence. These works are in white, on a pale-blue ground, and were glazed by a process now unknown. The subjects used on them were almost invariably the Madonna and Child. But Robbia did much in marble and bronze. In the Uffizi is to be seen a frieze for the front of an organ, by him. “It represents boys and girls of different ages, dancing, singing, and playing on various musical instruments, and is full of charming simplicity and childlike grace, and rich and varied in action. Some of the figures are almost wholly detached from the background, particularly in the representation of the dance.” There are many more names which might be added to this Tuscan or Florentine school of sculpture. Andrea Verocchio is the only one we will mention, and his strongest influence was exerted as the teacher of that master-artist of the sixteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci.