© 2005 UrbisMedia
Ask for the name of a “Renaissance man” and you will likely get the response Da Vinci, or perhaps Michelangelo, or even Lorenzo de Medici or Erasmus. Probably because his name is so easy to misspell or mispronounce, Filippo Brunelleschi’s name doesn’t come up that much. Most people, when they are looking at the magnificent dome that crowns Florence’s Santa Maria del Fiori, also known as the Duomo, don’t know what a bold architectural achievement it was to construct a cupola with such a span in the 15 th Century.
The Renaissance is often referred to as the birth of the “modern era,” by which is meant an age in which the explanation of reality by science and philosophy came into ascendancy, although not everywhere. Today, at a time in which in America the regression into anti-intellectual religious scripturalism and pseudo intellectual post-modernism are seemingly rocketing us rearwards through the Enlightenment and the Renaissance into a new Dark Age, there appears to be a need for a new “re-birth.” (The first Renaissance was actually seen as a rebirth of the Greco-Roman world.)
At such times a trip to Florence is prescribed. And to be more specific, a contemplation of Brunelleschi’s Dome. In fact, it would not be a bad idea to take along Ross, King’s book. It’s light enough (in weight) to be hauled up to the lantern that tops off the dome (463 steps), but failing to do that (as this writer has regrettably neglected to do during numerous visits to Florence) just plop down beside the statue of Brunelleschi in a niche in the street that runs to the right side of the cathedral. Here the architect and capomaestro cranes his view up toward his creation with as visage the shows the effects of the competitions, rivalries, intrigues and other challenges and obstacles that bore down upon him over the decades of its construction.
The unique dome, unlike any other constructed before its time and long afterward, was not only the biggest in Christendom (143 feet in diameter), but constructed in the boldest, the most risky and daring manner. It was a job for a true Renaissance man.
Yet Fillippo hardly looked the part. Short, bald, big-nosed and weak-chinned, he was imposing only intellectually. He was a goldsmith, sculptor, mathematician, architect, engineer, and mechanic. He failed in his competition with his rival Lorenzo Ghiberti to do the renowned Baptistry doors that Michelangelo called the “gates of paradise,” but he later used the Baptistry to establish the mathematics for linear perspective ( prospettivo ) in a famous experiment that employed his painting skills. Filippo, along with companion Donatello went off to Rome to measure and study the architecture of the antique world, and returned to reinterpret it in the distinctly Renaissance style as evident in the Pazzi Chapel at Santa Croce, and the Ospedale degli Innocenti.
But the dome he proposed for Santa Maria del Fiore departed from known methods. His cupola is actually composed of two domes, ingeniously related so that there would not be enough lateral stress to require external flying buttresses. The design required that Filippo design special lifts, cranes, and winches (the drawings for several of which are illustrated in this book) to elevate the building materials, and without benefit of central scaffolding. It was risky, and the committee deciding the contract nearly didn’t go for it. But it has been up there for nearly five centuries and even handled a lighting strike that only knocked off some tiles, and earthquakes in 1510, 1675 and 1895.
Brunelleschi reposes in a modest tomb in the floor of the cathedral. Only one other, St. Zenobius, is entombed here, but the martyr from AD 310, doesn’t have an inscription that reads Corpus Magni Ingenii Viri Phillippi Bruneslleschi Fiorentini. We will have to wonder what the “great ingenious man” might have accomplished with a computer and some CAD software.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.14.2005)