The Florentine Renaissance

The City as the Crucible of Culture

The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum will host one of the most-acclaimed masterpieces of the Florentine Renaissance through a special collaboration with the Guild of the Dome Association, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and the Museum of the Opera del Duomo: Lorenzo Ghiberti's (Italian, 1378-1455) The Gates of Paradise (1425-1452). On display in India for the first time, the full-scale lost-wax bronze replica of The Gates of Paradise, cast from the original mould, will allow visitors to discover Ghiberti's masterful sculptural and narrative rendering at close quarters and contextualise the civic values promoted by the great art of the period. The Gates of Paradise are an extraordinary illustration of the artistic, political, religious, and social contexts of Ghiberti and his patrons in fifteenth-century Florence. At the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, The Gates of Paradise evoke a fascinating thematic parallel between the artistic climate and civic values that shaped the Florentine Renaissance and the extraordinary Indian patronage and entrepreneurship that created Mumbai. Co-curated by Gerhard Wolf and Timothy Verdon, and advised by Mrs. Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, the exhibition offers visitors a rare experience of the civic values that give birth to the Florentine Renaissance—values that carry significant implications for the development of urban culture in a rapidly-urbanizing India.