Renaissance artwork travels for last time

ATLANTA– Adam is slowly rising from the rocky outcrop, weakly supporting himself on his right arm as God the creator pulls him up by the left hand. A beautiful, flowing Eve rises near them while a curious owl, perched in a fruit tree, looks down and tiny lizards slither below.\nThis is no mystical, otherworldly rendition of Genesis. Rather, this sculpted panel is a gripping narrative meant to serve as a bible for the poor and illiterate who would understand its main character – not a forbidding God, but man.\nAs such, this panel and the nine others of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise,” created between 1425 and 1452 for one set of doors in Florence’s Baptistery, are the hinges of a pivotal moment in the history of Western art.\nHere, and in the masterpieces around them in Florence’s cathedral square, the Renaissance was born, rounding out the hieratic spiritualism of the Middle Ages with a newly asserted belief in humanity.\nAmerican audiences have a unique chance to see the Genesis panel and two others from the doors beginning April 28 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The show will then travel to Chicago and New York, before returning to Italy, never to be moved again.\n“Everything came down from this. Man became the center of the universe,” said Patrizio Osticresi, administrator of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the private institution born more than 700 years ago to oversee the building of Florence’s cathedral and that now manages its conservation.\nThe bronze 31-square-inch panels in the Baptistery eastern doors, weighing about 200 pounds each, have been under restoration for more than 25 years, after being damaged by nearly 600 years of open-air exposure in Florence’s cathedral square and by floods that engulfed much of the city in 1966.\nOnce their restoration is complete, possibly in 2008, they will be fitted back into the frames and will never move again from the Opera museum. Since the 1990s, copies have been installed in the Baptistery.