This is a detail from one of the world’s most famous works of art: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s competition panel depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac, dating from around 1403. It’s famous not only because it’s a great work of art and it won Ghiberti the lucrative contract for the ‘Gates of Paradise’ doors of the baptistery of Florence, but because of the panel that hangs right beside it in the Bargello Museum–Filippo Brunelleschi’s competition panel depicting the same subject. Hoping to spur great artistic achievement, the Cathedral works department had sponsored the competition, setting the subject matter and frame of the pieces. Only these two survive. According to Vasari, the great biographer of Renaissance artists, Brunelleschi was livid when he lost to Ghiberti. Humiliated, he fled to Rome and lost himself in the study of ancient Roman buildings and the techniques used to construct them. Brunelleschi would return to Florence to gain the biggest commission of all: to build the dome of the cathedral. As good as his panel was, Ghiberti’s was better. He chose to depict the moment that Abraham is concentrating on the jugular where the Old Testament patriarch will thrust his knife. The wind blows on the mountaintop of Sinai; Abraham’s sleeve catches a gust. The angel has not quite arrived to stay Abraham’s hand. His determination to do god’s will is evident in his set features. Isaac has discerned the angel, and, while looking up, has exposed that very neck which is the knife’s target. Ghiberti chose the narrative moment of greatest tension and showed himself to be current with recent classicizing trends with the body of the boy being as well-muscled as  a Greek demigod.