The Baptistery interior, as seen from the east, past one of Ghiberti's two golden doors. Over the altar, on the dome, is the 13th century mosaic ceiling with Christ in Judgment, and below him, beneath his left hand, are the souls of the damned, presided over by Satan and various demons and monsters.

From Ghiberti's Golden Doors - praised by Michelangelo as the "Porta del Paradiso," the "Gates of Paradise" - you are looking back two centuries from the dawn of the Renaissance in the early 15th century to the height of the Middle Ages in the 13th century, when the Baptistery was built on the site of an early Christian building as the main church, civic center and cathedral of Florence. Here Dante was baptised and most of its other citizens.

It took Ghiberti and his workshop of assistants over a quarter of a century (1425-1452) to create the ten gold-plated bronze panels on these doors, with each panel showing two or three scenes from the lives of a famous figure in the Old Testament. The two panels glimpsed here show scenes from the lives of Jacob and Moses. In the upper panel Jacob, disguised by his mother Rebecca with goatskins covering his hands to fool blind old Isaac into thinking Jacob is his hairy older twin Esau, is seen kneeling to receive his father's blessing and all his lands and servants. Rebecca stands behind him to make sure he gets the job done. In the lower panel, we see Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments from the hands of God.

Despite the similarity in content between Ghiberti's Golden Doors and the medieval mosaic overhead - they both show scenes of saints and heroes from the Bible - there is a world of difference in how they are depicted. On the medieval ceiling, the figures are stiffly hieratic and static, more like two-dimensional cutout dolls or figures on a chessboard than real people. But Ghiberti's figures, inspired by classical statues, inhabit real physical bodies with realistic anatomy, and they are seen in various poses that express different actions and emotions, like real-life actors on a stage. And that stage itself, the landscape and space they live and move in, is a real three-dimensional world, governed by laws of geometric perspective newly discovered or created by Brunelleschi and others in the Florentine Renaissance.

On the altar below the 25-foot tall moaic of Christ in Judgment is a bronze statue of ?, and to the right can be seen the canopied tomb of Antipope John XXIII. On the front of the altar there used to be two silver panels by Verrocchio, one of which showed John the Baptist about to be beheaded by a nearly naked swordsman and surrounded by five elaborately armored guards, two of which might be by Leonardo da Vinci. That panel, now on tour in Atlanta and afterwards in Los Angeles, was sent along with the other one some time ago to Florence's Duomo Museum (across from the Duomo Cathedral) and replaced by two decorative marble panels with the stylized lily of Florence. .

If you look closely, high above the altar, on the front of the arch overhead, you can make out a series of mosaic panels, The central mosaic shows the head of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence and its Baptistery:



Since Saint John is usually shown in full in the act of baptising various Jews, above all Jesus as their - and our - Messiah, to make sure he is ID'd correctly, his name is here spelled out in big Gothic letters around his halo: SCS IOHA BATISTA (Saint John the Baptist)

In the above photo, to the right of the altar is an elaborate tomb - the final resting place of an Antipope, John XXIII:


The Tomb of Antipope John XXIII, by Donatello and Michelozzo.1422-1428. Marble polychrome, gilded bronze, 24 feet high.

Erected between 1422 and 1428, this tomb monument was the first of several collaborations between Cosimo the Elder's favorite sculptor, Donatello, and his favorite architect, Michelozzo, But I can't see that their collaboration was successful here. Though the sculptures stacked up between Michelozzo's 24-foot-high Corinthian columns resulted in the tallest sculpture in Florence, those massive columns actually defeat their purpose: instead of magnifying the dead pope, they are so out of scale with everything wedged between them that they only dwarf and diminish his stature.

There's a slim chance that Donatello designed the half-moon lunette with the Madonna and Child, and the bronze effigy of the dead pope..But he presumably did design the marble relief at the bottom in which a Christianized vesion of the Three Graces of antiqutiy personify the Three Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity.

You can tell from the effigy atop the sarcophagus that a pope is interred here. But why here, you may ask, rather than in Rome with the other popes? If you know the story of John XXIII and why he was called the "Antipope" you know the answer

Not to be confused with the recent Pope John XXIII, who took the same name, this Renaisance pope was one of a handful of 15th century cardinals who in 1408 revolted against Pope Gregory XII in Rome and set up one of their own as pope in Pisa, and later in Avignon, France. In 1409 the renegade cardinals elected Cardinal Baldassare Cossa their Pope. He reigned until 1412, when both he and Pope Gregory abdicated in favor of a new Pope, Martin V. Freed by Martin from a German prison in 1418. Cossa died as bishop of Florence the next year. Though accused by his enemies in Rome of piracy, murder, rape, simony and incest, Cossa was buried with great honors by the Medici, who always took care of their guys, and, thanks to Cosimo di Medici, was later interred with great honors in this grandiose gold-plated tomb in the Baptistery. The Latin inscription under his effigy begins "John the former (or late) Pope..," which did not sit well with his successor, Pope Martin, who was himself buried beneath a simple bronze floor slab. Somewhere in the Baptistery may be a relic bequeathed by Cossa to Florence: John the Baptist's right index finger - the one he supposedly pointed to Jesus when he first saw him, saying 'There is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (The Gospel of John 1;29).