Turning to the facts: the new spiritual atmosphere, with its strong artistic potentialities, which followed the preaching of St. Francis, was much more favourable to the painter’s art than to that of the sculptor. We have seen that Giotto was able to give adequate expression to the dominant ideas of his age with much greater freedom than such an artist as Andrea Pisano. This general tendency unfavourable to the growth of a vigorous school of Italian sculpture, continued for a long time. Its effect in turning the budding artist’s dreams towards painting or influencing his work in unsculpturesque fashion cannot be doubted. Perhaps this can be most fully illustrated by the subsequent history of the doors of the Florentine baptistery. It will be remembered that Andrea Pisano had erected the first of the three bronze doors seventy years earlier. The political difficulties in the latter part of the fourteenth century prevented the Florentines completing the work. In 1403, however, as a thank-offering after the great plague of 1400, the Guild of Florentine merchants decided to complete the bronze doors of the baptistery. The commission was offered for public competition and advertized throughout Italy. The account left by Lorenzo Ghiberti, the eventual winner, enables us to realize the effect of the news. Ghiberti had been born in 1381, so that he was barely out of his teens when the announcement of the Florentine Guild was published. He had been educated as a goldsmith, a craft which always flourishes when wealth is accumulating, civil disorders are frequent and banking systems insecure. It provides a ready means of hoarding a small store against a time of stress. But to an artist of ardent imagination and real ambition like the youth Ghiberti, the narrow limits set by goldsmithery were cramping. Reading between the lines, we can see that he was seriously contemplating abandoning his own art for the more expressive art of painting. He had indeed taken the first step. In a passage from his own manuscript in the Magliabecchian Library, he narrates: “In my youth, anno Christi 1400, moved both by the corrupted air of Florence and the bad state of the country, I fled with a worthy painter who had been sent for by Signor Malatesta of Pesaro, and he gave us a room to paint, which we did with great diligence. My soul was at this time much turned towards painting, partly from the hope of the works in which Signor Malatesta promised to employ us; and partly because my companion was always showing me the honour and utility which would accrue to me. Nevertheless, at this moment, when my friends wrote to me that the governors of the baptistery were sending for masters whose skill in bronze working they wished to prove, and that from all Italian lands many maestri were coming to place themselves in this strife of talent, I could no longer forbear, and asked leave of Signor Malatesta who let me depart.”