FERDINAND BARBEDIENNE
(Saint-Martin-de-Fresnay 1810 – 1892 Paris)
after LORENZO GHIBERTI (Florence, 1378 – 1455)
The Story of Joseph from the Second Baptistery Doors,
Florence (“The Gates of Paradise”)
Signed at the lower right of the principal relief: F. BARBEDIENNE
Nine bronze reliefs set into a wooden frame
27 ½ x 27 ½ inches (70 x 70 cm)
Provenance:
Private Collection, USA
Barbedienne’s “Gates of Paradise” reliefs are one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century bronze casting and patination. The nine panels that comprise our example are half-size reductions of the famous originals by Lorenzo Ghiberti, made for the Baptistery of Florence and now housed in the Museo del Opera del Duomo. Mounted in an impressive, mullioned frame surround, our work is an exceptional exemplar of the Renaissance Revival, the broadly influential style and movement that infused architecture, design, and artistic culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The central scene, The Story of Joseph, is perhaps the most celebrated of the entire series depicting as it does seven episodes from the Biblical narrative integrated into a single composition: Joseph cast by his brethren into the well, Joseph sold to the merchants, the merchants delivering Joseph to the pharaoh, Joseph interpreting the pharaoh’s dream, the pharaoh paying him honor, Jacob sending his sons to Egypt, and Joseph recognizes his brothers and returns home. The surrounding reliefs—two vertical figures in niches, two recumbent figures, and four portrait heads in roundels—are as well faithful reductions of Ghiberti’s original bronzes on other parts of the doors.
The maker of these casts was the renowned 19th-century French fondeur Ferdinand Barbedienne. Gary Radke has recently written of this great enterprise:
“The Parisian bronze caster Ferdinand Barbedienne began making half-sized copies of ancient and Renaissance sculpture in the 1830s. His firm benefitted enormously from the collaboration of Achille Collas, whom Meredith Shedd has shown was one of numerous pioneers in the mechanical reproduction of sculpture. Their competitors largely devoted themselves to reproducing relief sculpture, but Collas devised a process for creating fully three-dimensional copies. A tracing needle, powered by a treadle, moved over the surface of a full-sized plaster cast or bronze of the original and triggered a complementary action in a cutting stylus set over a soft plaster blank…He signed an exclusive contract with Barbedienne on November 29, 1838, and won medals for his inventions in 1839 and 1844.
Barbedienne’s half-sized copies of the Gates of Paradise were famous not only for their fidelity to the original, but also for the way their gilding…suggested the glimmering surface that was hidden under centuries of dirt. Some critics even saw Collas’s and Barbedienne’s work as ‘philanthropic, an exemplary adaptation of industry to the requirements of art, the artist, the workers, and the public alike.’
At 25,000 francs, Collas’s and Barbedienne’s reduction of the Gates of Paradise was singularly more expensive than any other item for sale in their shop. All the reliefs, individual statuettes, and busts were cast separately and could be purchased either by the piece or as an ensemble. Fittingly, Barbedienne’s accomplishment earned him the Grand Prix at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle, along with numerous other medals.”[1]
Three complete examples of the Barbedienne-Ghiberti doors are known. One, first installed in a chapel in the Villa Demidoff of San Donato near Pratolino, was later acquired by William Vanderbilt and installed in his mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York (Fig. 1). Following the demolition of that house in 1946, the doors were gifted to the University of Nevada in Reno, where they now form the entrance to the Special Collections of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center. A second set appeared at auction in London in 2017, while a third brought the extraordinary amount of €337,500 at a sale at the Hôtel Drouot sale in Paris in 2014.
Individual scenes were cast to order directly from Barbedienne’s studio, but it would seem that few were actually made. Both the 1886 and 1893 editions of the Catalogue des Bronzes d’art of the Barbedienne Atelier list the “Histoire de Joseph” from the “Porte principale du Baptistère de Florence par Lorenzo Ghiberti” for sale at 700 francs. However, only two other examples are known today—one of which we were privileged to handle some years ago. Our cast is exceptionally preserved, with the brilliant gilding and patination for which Barbedienne was celebrated intact.
Fig. 1. Ferdinand Barbedienne, The Second Baptistery Doors, Florence (“The Gates of Paradise”), bronze, as installed in the Vanderbildt Mansion, New York, 1883.
[1] Gary Radke, “Ghiberti on Fifth Avenue: The Vanderbilt Copy of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise,” in The Historian’s Eye: Essays in Italian Art in Honor of Andrew Ladis, ed. Hayden B. J. Maginnis and Shelley E. Zuraw, Athens, Georgia, 2009, pp. 235-246.