Ghiberti's Baptistery doors in Florence are among the high marks of Renaissance art—and among the most popular sights in a city of priceless art treasures. Los Angeles is as unlike Florence as any city, especially when you consider how few religious-art treasures the city has to its name; so it was especially important for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of L.A. to get it right when commissioning a new cathedral, Our Lady of the Angels, which is now nearing completion on a hilltop site near the heart of downtown. The cathedral itself was designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo, best known for his Concert Hall in Barcelona. It is being constructed to last 500 years (an unusual concept in a city known for its impermanence) and will attract a great deal of attention for L.A.'s Catholic archdiocese, which is the largest in the United States. Church officials chose the LA. sculptor Robert Graham to perform the Ghiberti-like task of creating monumental doors for Our Lady of the Angels—a triumphant entrance for the cathedral that will pop, but at the same time complement the Moneo design. The bronze doors are three stories high, weigh 25 tons, and operate on a hydraulic system. Graham, a native of Mexico, whose other large-scale sculptures include the 1984 L.A. Olympic Gateway and the Duke Ellington Memorial in Central Park, worked for five years on the project and collaborated with 150 craftsmen and technicians. Among the sculptor's main interests for the project was producing "very New World images" representing the cultural diversity of the Los Angeles community. Forty cultures are symbolized in bronze relief, including Chumash Indian (an indigenous California tribe), Samoan, and Croatian. "There are also images from the Old World," he notes, "from Spain and Italy"—a tip of the hat to the land of the Pope, and Ghiberti.