Paradise Found
A replica of an early Renaissance masterpiece has taken up permanent residence at the BYU Museum of Art.
By Sierra K. Martin (BA ’26) in the Summer 2026 issue
While cleaning out a BYU–Hawaii art storage room more than a decade ago, service missionary Sharon R. Gray (BA ’68, EdD ’92) stumbled across a hidden treasure sitting in crates. “I pulled the bubble wrap back and saw these faces that I recognized,” she recalls. Having studied in Florence, Italy, in 1984, former BYU art professor Gray immediately recognized what she had uncovered: a plaster replica of early Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti’s famed Florence Baptistery doors. “I was astonished,” she says.
The original gilded bronze panels, with their combination of low- and high-relief techniques to create visual depth, have been celebrated as a crown of Renaissance art since the 15th century. Impressed by their magnificence, Michelangelo dubbed them the Gates of Paradise.
But what were they doing in Laie, Hawaii? “I became a detective,” says Gray, “trying to figure out the provenance of these pieces.” And what should be done with them now?
The panel replicas, she learned, had been cast after World War II and eventually acquired by BYU–Hawaii art faculty Jan G. Fisher (BA ’65). While in Florence in 1984, Fisher had happened upon a foundry, where he learned from the craftsmen of several sets of plaster replicas of the Gates of Paradise. One of the foundrymen had a connection to Latter-day Saint sculptor Avard Fairbanks, whose work was a part of the Laie Hawaii Temple. Later that year Fisher arranged for one set of the plaster replicas to be shipped in 11 crates to the BYU–Hawaii campus. There, without an adequate place to display them or the resources to restore them, they sat in storage for more than three decades.
Gray, determined to give the panels proper care and a permanent home, started making phone calls.
Thanks to a generous donation from William P. (BA ’71, MBA ’73) and Barbara Taylor Benac (BA ’91) and a collaborative effort between BYU–Hawaii and BYU’s Museum of Art, the plasters arrived in Provo in July 2016. A team of art curators, production specialists, and students would spend the next decade restoring the panels to their original grandeur. It wasn’t easy.
When the panels first arrived, the restoration team found figures with snapped-off limbs, a dog with a chipped nose, and panels that had broken completely in half. Formerly sharp edges had worn away; faces had lost detail. The final condition report detailing each of the flaws was more than 300 pages long.
“I had to learn a lot about plaster,” says John Q. Adams, the MOA’s manager of exhibit production and installation. “There’s more than just adding powder to water.” The team mended the plaster with painstaking detail, carefully researching and referencing the original in Florence. Adams and the team searched far and wide for the right tools for their task, and they ended up creating and modifying many tools themselves. Dental picks proved to be particularly useful in bringing out detail from the gypsum plasters.
To create the finish, they sealed the restored plaster with shellac before covering each panel in 23 karat gold leaf. The material was so thin and fragile that the artists could handle it only with squirrel-hair brushes.
Art graduate Elizabeth J. Mallory (BA ’25) worked on the project for two and a half years as a student, meticulously restoring the plaster. For six months she trained with Adams on practice plaster casts before moving on to the Gates of Paradise panels. She even made the trip to Florence to see the originals in person. “It was really neat to stand in front of them in their full glory,” she says. “You just don’t realize how grand they are until you’re a tiny little person in front of these massive doors.”
Mallory says the deliberate process taught her the importance of preparation and humility—“losing the ego,” she says. “[We] weren’t there to make [our] own Gates; we were there to restore Ghiberti’s.”
Adams recruited BYU’s manufacturing and welding shops to help design the steel armature in which the Gates of Paradise are now displayed. Fully assembled, the piece stands 18 feet tall and 10 feet wide.
The narrative panels tell stories of familiar biblical characters—Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Abraham and Isaac, Moses. “Seeing how Ghiberti has brought them to life, seeing how he’s put multiple scenes in one, . . . seeing how he imagined it hopefully will help people bring this scripture to life in a new way,” says MOA director Janalee Emmer (BA ’97, MA ’01).
In addition to the 10 large narrative panels, 24 narrow panels depict biblical prophets and leaders, while 8 small square panels add busts of various biblical and historical figures (including a self-portrait of Ghiberti).
The MOA team initially considered displaying the panels at eye level, but ultimately decided to arrange them vertically as Ghiberti had intended. “He built perspective into all the bigger panels,” Adams says. “Each panel at [its] level is meant to be viewed from the person standing on the ground.”
“With the rise of humanism during the 15th century in Italy, there’s a lot of new ideas taking hold, and Ghiberti is experimenting with them in these panels,” says Emmer. “He’s one of the first to be exploring linear perspective in the panel itself. . . . You get a sense of space and depth and even of time passing with multiple scenes.”
The exhibition Gilded Paradise: Recasting Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Baptistery Doors opened at the BYU Museum of Art in February. Along with the imposing replica doors, the exhibit includes 3D-printed scans of a few of the panels that visitors can touch.
“Being involved in this discovery and journey has been a total mind-boggling blessing,” says Gray, who marvels at the replica’s transformation “from an unknown condition in the crates to a restored and gilded magnificence.”
“Florence to Hawaii to Provo. . . . That’s a curious, circuitous path,” says Emmer. “It’s required a lot of people to get to this place. The Lord is using all of us in small and big ways to bring things to pass.”
Feedback: Send comments on this article to magazine@byu.edu.
Update: An earlier version of this article described the Gates replica as being “homeless” before being displayed at BYU, when in fact it had long been stored and preserved at BYU–Hawaii.
