Editing Lorenzo Ghiberti (section)

== Other works ==
He was also a collector of classical artifacts and a historian. He was actively involved in the spreading of [[Renaissance humanism|humanist]] ideas. His unfinished ''Commentarii'' are a valuable source of information about Renaissance art and contains what is considered the first autobiography of an artist. This work was a major source for [[Vasari]]'s ''[[Vite]]''.<ref>[http://www.artnet.com/library/03/0319/t031930.asp Artnet artist biographies] retrieved January 25, 2010</ref>

Ghiberti's "Commentario" includes the earliest known surviving autobiography of an artist. He discusses the development of art from the time of [[Cimabue]] through to his own work. In describing his second bronze portal for the Florence Baptistry, he states: "In this work I sought to imitate nature as closely as possible, both in proportions and in perspective... the buildings appear as seen by the eye of one who gazes on them from a distance." The language Ghiberti used to describe his art has proved invaluable to art historians in understanding the aims Renaissance artists were striving for in their artworks.

[[Paolo Uccello]], who was commonly regarded as the first great master of perspective, worked in Ghiberti's workshop for several years, making it difficult to determine the extent to which Uccello's innovations in perspective were due to Ghiberti's instruction. Donatello, known for one of the first examples of central-point perspective in sculpture, also worked briefly in Ghiberti's workshop. It was also about this time that Paolo began his lifelong friendship with Donatello. In about 1413 one of Ghiberti's contemporaries, Filippo Brunelleschi, demonstrated the geometrical method of perspective used today by artists, by painting the outlines of various Florentine buildings onto a mirror. When the building's outline was continued, he noticed that all of the lines converged on the horizon line.

Recent scholarship indicates that in his work on perspective, Ghiberti was influenced by the Arab polymath [[Ibn al-Haytham|Alhazen]] who had written about the optical basis of perspective in the early eleventh century. His ''[[Book of Optics]]'' was translated into Italian in the fourteenth century as ''Deli Aspecti'',<ref>{{citation|first=Charles M.|last=Falco|title=Ibn al-Haytham and the Origins of Modern Image Analysis|date=12–15 February 2007|publisher=International Conference on Information Sciences, Signal Processing and its Applications}}</ref> and was quoted at length in Ghiberti's "Commentario terzo." Author A. Mark Smith suggests that, through Ghiberti, Alhazen's ''Book of Optics'' "may well have been central to the development of artificial perspective in early Renaissance Italian painting."<ref>{{citation|title=The Latin Source of the Fourteenth-Century Italian Translation of Alhacen's ''De aspectibus'' (Vat. Lat. 4595)|author=A. Mark Smith|journal=[[Arabic Sciences and Philosophy]]|volume=11|year=2001|publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]]|pages=27–43 [28]|doi=10.1017/s0957423901001035|s2cid=170587522}}</ref>