The first time I stood in front of the Gates of Paradise at the BYU Museum of Art, I didn’t move. I couldn’t speak.
A month before, I had come from presenting at a symposium at BYU–Hawaii—ironically, I spoke right before Sharon Gray, the woman whose discovery made this entire story possible.
The story, as Sharon recounted it, still seems incredible to me today.
In 2015, while serving as a missionary at BYU–Hawaii, she was assigned what sounded like a routine (and tedious) task: cleaning out a cluttered storage room in the McKay building. Buried among ceramics, dust, and decades of accumulation were large wooden crates no one seemed to want.
When she finally reached them, she peeled back a layer of bubble wrap and saw a face.
But this wasn’t any face–it was a face from the Renaissance.
“I know what these are,” she remembers thinking. “Why are these here?”
Inside those crates were gypsum casts of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise—the famed bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery, commissioned in 1425 and completed over the ensuing 27 years. The Gates of Paradise was a masterpiece so influential that Michelangelo himself reportedly declared them worthy of paradise.
And somehow, a full set of these casts had been sitting, largely forgotten, in a relatively small college town on the windward side of Oahu, Hawaii for over three decades.
Florence > Laie > Provo
Standing in disbelief, Sharon eventually called the BYU Museum of Art. Conversations began.
Experts were brought in.
Crates were opened in what participants described as an “Indiana Jones moment”—a careful unveiling of something both fragile and inconceivable.
Despite decades in less than perfect storage conditions, the casts were salvageable.
That set in motion a ten-year effort that was one part art conservation and one part educational experiment. Led by museum professionals and leveraging a small army of students, the project quickly became a hands-on restoration lab. 13,000+ hours went into repairing surfaces, recovering lost detail, and eventually gilding each panel to closely mimicking the brilliance of the original doors.
White, dusty plaster had transformed into art that was both breathtaking and beautiful.
Discovery
At the symposium in Hawaii, Sharon showed images of crates, straw packing, and fragile surfaces. She spoke with a responsibility to “tell it correctly.”
Literally weeks later, in Provo, I watched those same forms catch light.
The museum installation doesn’t replicate the original doors’ function—they no longer swing open—but the design still carries that sense of threshold. Of encountering Deity.
Each panel holds tentpole narratives from the Old Testament—Adam & Eve, Noah & Family, Jacob & Esau, Moses & The Israelites, David & Goliath, Cain & Abel, Abraham & Isaac, Joseph & His Brothers, Joshua & Jericho, and Solomon & the Queen of Sheba. All are rendered with a depth and perspective that helped define early Renaissance sculpture.
Standing close, I could see both the fingerprints of Ghiberti’s vision and the eager students who carefully restored these plaster surfaces centuries later.
The Gates of Paradise, as they are at the MOA, are a collaboration across distance and time.
These doors, the originals created for a specific place and purpose in Florence, Italy, now have a new permanent home in Provo, Utah. It reminds me that transcendent art can and should adapt just as its depth of meaning endures.
Rediscovery
There’s a line Sharon shared that really impacted me: “I believe that our God is a God of found things.”
Maybe this story isn’t about rediscovered artwork; maybe it’s about initially overlooking value and about people—students, donors, curators, missionaries—choosing to recognize significance when they find it.
And, maybe it’s also about timing.
The casts arrived in Hawaii in 1984—the same year Sharon studied in Florence. Decades later, she would be the one to uncover them. Decades after that, they would finally be seen.
Standing in the museum, I considered that this convergence did not feel like coincidence.
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Restoration
As I left the gallery, I found myself doing what the exhibit subtly invites: slowing down and pondering.
The educational materials, the 3D reproductions, the immersive design—all are incredible (as every BYU MOA exhibit tends to be).
For me, the true impact happened in silence, when it was just me and the Gates of Paradise. In that stillness, the panels spoke—of divine creation, and of divine restoration.
My mind kept going back to that humid storage room in Hawai‘i—the crates and the forgotten plaster hidden under years of dust.
And then . . .
The moment of discovery when the light broke through the first crate and the bubble wrap underneath, revealing the renaissance-era crafted faces.. What was once overlooked was found.
Then, what was fragile was carefully renewed.
The dull and decaying plaster was gilded until its bright gold reflected the rays of heaven.
I realize that I’m not all that different from those plaster casts—broken here and there, worn by the decades, in need of the Master’s touch to be all I can and should be.
Our Savior is in relentless pursuit of us–throughout our life, He finds us in the forgotten crevices and corners where we’ve been left, unseen and unsightly, and begins the slow, patient work of restoration. His mercy reinforces what’s cracked, His love replaces what’s missing, and His Atonement gilds what was plain until His light is reflected in our very essence.
What was forgotten becomes holy.
That is the miracle of Christ—our Refiner and Redeemer—who transforms us and reveals our natures as His true masterpieces.
Guest Author
dyejo
