On August 19, 1418, a competition concerning Florence's magnificent
new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore--already under construction
for more than a century--was announced: "Whoever desires to make
any model or design for the vaulting of the main Dome....shall do
so before the end of the month of September." The proposed dome was
regarded far and wide as all but impossible to build: not only
would it be enormous, but its original and sacrosanct design
shunned the flying buttresses that supported cathedrals all over
Europe. The dome would literally need to be erected over thin air.
Of the many plans submitted, one stood out--a daring and unorthodox
solution to vaulting what is still the largest dome (143 feet in
diameter) in the world. It was offered not by a master mason or
carpenter, but by a goldsmith and clockmaker named Filippo
Brunelleschi, then forty-one, who would dedicate the next
twenty-eight years to solving the puzzles of the dome's
construction. In the process, he did nothing less than reinvent the
field of architecture.
"Brunelleschi's Dome" is the story of how a Renaissance genius bent
men, materials, and the very forces of nature to build an
architectural wonder we continue to marvel at today. Denounced at
first as a madman, Brunelleschi was celebrated at the end as a
genius. He engineered the perfect placement of brick and stone,
built ingenious hoists and cranes (among some of the most renowned
machines of the Renaissance) to carry an estimated 70 million
pounds hundreds of feet into the air, and designed the workers'
platforms and routines so carefully that only one man died during
the decades of construction--all the while defying those who said
the dome would surely collapse and his own personal obstacles that
at times threatened to overwhelm him. This drama was played out
amid plagues, wars, political feuds, and the intellectual ferments
of Renaissance Florence-- events Ross King weaves into the story to
great effect, from Brunelleschi's bitter, ongoing rivalry with the
sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti to the near catpure of Florence by the
Duke of Milan. King also offers a wealth of fascinating detail that
opens windows onto fifteenth-century life: the celebrated
traditions of the brickmaker's art, the daily routine of the
artisans laboring hundreds of feet above the ground as the dome
grew ever higher, the problems of transportation, the power of the
guilds.
Even today, in an age of soaring skyscrapers, the cathedral dome of
Santa Maria del Fiore retains a rare power to astonish. Ross King
brings its creation to life in a fifteenth-century chronicle with
twenty-first-century resonance.
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