Lorenzo Ghiberti

In 1401 Florence held a competition that art historians often use to mark the start of the Renaissance. The city's cloth merchants wanted a grand set of bronze doors for the Baptistery, and asked sculptors to submit a trial panel of Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac. Lorenzo Ghiberti was about 23. His main rival was Filippo Brunelleschi, the man who would later raise the great dome over Florence Cathedral.

The judges could not choose between them and offered to split the work. Brunelleschi refused to share and walked away, leaving the doors to Ghiberti, who would spend the next two decades on them. Both trial panels survive, side by side, in the Bargello museum in Florence.

That first set went so well that in 1425 the city gave him a second pair, and he worked on those for 27 years. Their ten gilded panels of Old Testament scenes were so admired that Michelangelo is said to have called them worthy to be the Gates of Paradise, and the name stuck. Ghiberti ran a large workshop the whole time, and among the young assistants who trained there were Donatello and Paolo Uccello, who carried the new style into the next generation.