Atlanta ? Adam is slowly rising from the rocky outcrop, weakly supporting himself on his right arm as God the creator pulls him up by the left hand. A beautiful, flowing Eve rises near them while a curious owl, perched in a fruit tree, looks down and tiny lizards slither below.

Workers at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta set up displays Friday for the exhibit of Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates

This is no mystical, otherworldly rendition of Genesis. Rather, this sculpted panel is a gripping narrative meant to serve as a bible for the poor and illiterate who would understand its main character – not a forbidding God, but man.

As such, this panel and the nine others of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise,” created between 1425 and 1452 for one set of doors in Florence’s Baptistery, are the hinges of a pivotal moment in the history of Western art.

Here, and in the masterpieces around them in Florence’s cathedral square, the Renaissance was born, rounding out the hieratic spiritualism of the Middle Ages with a newly asserted belief in humanity.

American audiences have a unique chance to see the Genesis panel and two others from the doors beginning April 28 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The show will then travel to Chicago and New York before returning to Italy, never to be moved again.

“Everything came down from this. Man became the center of the universe,” said Patrizio Osticresi, administrator of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the private institution born more than 700 years to oversee the building of Florence’s cathedral and that now manages its conservation.

The bronze 31-square-inch panels in the Baptistery eastern doors, weighing about 200 pounds each, have been under restoration for more than 25 years, after being damaged by nearly 600 years of open-air exposure in Florence’s cathedral square and by floods that engulfed much of the city in 1966.

Once their restoration is complete, possibly in 2008, they will be fitted back into the frames and will never move again from the Opera museum. Since the 1990s, copies have been installed in the Baptistery.

All panels tell Old Testament stories, and the three in Atlanta portray the creation of Adam and Eve, the brotherly disputes of Jacob and Esau, and the battle of David and Goliath, all in astonishingly minute, realistic detail.

Instead of stylized figures set against a flat background of medieval art, Ghiberti’s characters rise into three dimensions to inhabit a real world seen through a scientifically correct perspective.

In the David panel, the hero is pushing down on his sword with all his strength as the blade is about to sever the fallen giant’s head. A fleeing soldier gazes back at the slaying, frozen in a look of incredulity and horror amid the general fray.

The panels, each mingling several episodes of the main story, come alive in the lifelike plasticity of the figures. The farthest images, such as Eve spellbound by the serpent or David returning to Jerusalem with Goliath’s head, are barely etched in the gilded bronze, while the ones closest to the viewer, such as Adam and Eve fleeing paradise, are sculpted almost in the round.

Ghiberti had something for all his Renaissance audiences, said exhibit curator Gary Radke, from children attracted to the small animals, palm trees and big crowd scenes to scholars whose latest scientific advances – such as perspective – he incorporated.

Michelangelo was a great admirer of Ghiberti’s work, and said the doors truly were “gates to paradise” because of their beauty, and not only because of the Baptistery’s message of salvation.

Today’s viewers can similarly appreciate the naturalism and the individuality of each figure, which Ghiberti captured in the movement of a foot, the tilt of a head. A section of the show also focuses on the restoration.

The partnership with the Opera scores another high-profile success for the High Museum, which is in its first year of hosting collections from the Louvre Museum in Paris. In exchange for the three panels and other smaller sculptures from the doors’ frame, the High paid about $200,000 to help the Opera restore an early Renaissance silver altar.