Ghiberti Doors Poster

Grace Cathedral entrance has an impressive pair of doors, often called the Ghiberti doors. They are a copy of the doors of the Florence Baptistry by Lorenzo Ghiberti, also dubbed Gates of Paradise. It has been said that they had been removed from a Renaissance church in Florence, but it is now known that during World War II the Nazi occupation government had ordered the doors to be removed from the church (to protect them from bombing and maybe to give Hermann Göring a chance to add them to his collection) and that they had been hidden in a disused railway tunnel and that reproductions had been made. The philanthropist Charles D. Field bought these replicas, and they were then shipped to San Francisco and installed on the newly-completed church in time for its official dedication in 1964. Curiously, the original Ghiberti Doors are no longer installed on the baptistry: Conservators have decided that they must be preserved in a totally dry, controlled atmosphere. The doors now on the baptistry are also modern replicas, installed in 1990. The originals, after cleaning and restoration, toured various U.S. museums from 2005 to 2007