Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>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 <jats:italic>Gates of Paradise</jats:italic> and Botticelli’s <jats:italic>Birth of Venus</jats:italic> as indicative of a melancholic perspective on the Florentine Renaissance as a “Paradise Lost.” The city was ambivalently idealized as an “Earthly Paradise.”</jats:p>