Study for or after Moses on Mount Sinai, from the Gates of Paradise, Baptistry in Florence (1425-52)

Allan Marquand wrote about this relief in 1894, and recognized it as a detail from Moses Receiving the Tables of the Law on Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery. he believed that the disparities between its figures and those on the door indicated that the relief seen here was a preparatory sketch model. Most scholars now consider it a copy made after the door was finished. Thermoluminescence tests that might date the terracotta have been inconclusive.

It is unclear why a copy of a detail might have been made, but there may be a parallel with young Michelangelo’s drawings after figures in frescoes by Giotto and Masaccio. Like those masters, Ghiberti was revered in the later fifteenth century—it was Michelangelo who gave the Bapistery doors the name The Gates of Paradise. An artist of his generation might have made this relief as an exercise and homage to a great Florentine sculptor. The presence of a head not in the finished relief, wearing a hat in later-fifteenth-century style, seems to support this hypothesis.