Florence as “Paradise Lost”

Abstract

Abstract The city of Florence has been a place of artistic pilgrimage for centuries. This essay discusses late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American interest in Florence and, specifically, two of its masterpieces in Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as indicative of a melancholic perspective on the Florentine Renaissance as a “Paradise Lost.” The city was ambivalently idealized as an “Earthly Paradise.”