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The detail depicts Isaac sending Esau to hunt.
Following his journey to Rome in 1416, Ghiberti showed himself ever more receptive to ancient art. The models are never copied in a servile fashion, but are, rather, exploited as an inexhaustible source of inspiration, and transformed by a wholly modern, dynamic interpretation. The group of women on the left side, whose draperies move in folds revealing the forms of the body or fly in wind-lifted arabesques, appear in several scenes on the Gates of Paradise, each time in a new version. They are borrowed from antique sculpture, as in the canephore, whose ornamental potential was often to be exploited in Florentine renaissance painting.
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