Scenes from the Life of St. John the Baptist

Trained in Pisa but active especially in Florence, the greatest sculptor of the Italian trecento left the highest testimony of his art in the south door of the Florentine Baptistery, on which he was working in 1330; the waxes were cast by Venetian craftsmen in the following years and then chased and gilded by Andrea himself. The doors are divided into rectangular panels in which, within mixtilinear quatrefoil frames, twenty episodes from the life of the Baptist are narrated and eight Virtues are represented. Andrea here revealed a highly personal, restrained style, which expresses in a most harmonious presentation the vivid perception of an event or a feeling.