"The Story of Joseph (The Gates of Paradise)"

In comparison with his panels for the earlier doors, these panels are more naturalistic in terms of Ghiberti's use of perspective and the rendering of the figures. Many historians noted that of all the ten panels on the Gates of Paradise, the Joseph panel was the most difficult, and also most beautiful.  It is noteworthy because of Ghiberti's invention, order, manner, and design, that his figures appear to move and to have souls. While the foreground figures are presented in high relief (leading to nearly free-standing figures), the figures further back are presented in low relief, following Donatello's technique of rilievo schiacciato (flattened relief), and the rest of the panel involves the application of incised lines, creating a very dynamic and complex sense of space.

The use of the rectangular (rather than quatrefoil) format, moreover, allowed Ghiberti to explore depth of space fully in all the scenes. The ten panels contain figures rendered in such high relief they are almost completely in the round. Each panel has clever devices of perspective, which give the illusion of real depth in scenes which are quite complex with multiple areas of action. The panel showing the story of Joseph (son of Jacob) is a particularly fine example of Ghiberti's skill at rendering depth with the double layer of receding architectural features behind the crowd of foreground figures.