Sicilian Culture: News: Brunelleschi's Dome - How A Rennaissance Genius Reinvented Architechture

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Brunelleschi's Dome - How A Rennaissance Genius Reinvented Architechture
By Ross King
Top Adult NonFiction Book of the Year—Book Sense, 2001
Anyone alive in Florence on August 19, 1418, would have understood the significance of the competition announced that day concerning the city’s magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, already under construction for more than a century. “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 eschewed (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 clock maker named Filippo Brunelleschi, then 41, who would dedicate the next 28 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 (some among 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 personal obstacles that at times threatened to overwhelm him. This drama was played out amidst 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 capture 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. In telling the story of the greatest engineering puzzle of the Renaissance and one of the world’s architectural marvels, Ross King brings its creation to life in a fifteenth-century chronicle with twenty-first-century resonance.
www.walkerbooks.com/nonfiction/books/catalog.php3?key=134&type=news
Reviews of Brunelleschi's Dome
“An altogether enchanting tale.” —Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter
“King demonstrates a remarkable range…but he always brings us back to the one incandescent mind performing the one matchless feat that would forever transform architecture from a mechanical craft into a creative art.” — Booklist
“A compelling story of one of the greatest structural engineering achievements of the Renaissance.” —Henry Petroski, author of Engineers of Dreams
“That how [Brunelleschi] did it still manages to mystify us after half a millennium makes this study of life, art, religion, and politics doubly fascinating.” —BookPage
"As interesting as the architect's triumph proves, his distractions prove even more revealing about the era." —Newsday
"One of architecture's great tales." —Newsweek
"Brunelleschi's Dome describes how the dome was so ambitious that Brunelleschi had to invent many of the machines that built it." —The New Yorker
"This book is a journey through Renaissance Florence…The context in which Brunelleschi worked was as astonishing as the workings of his mind." —Portland Oregonian
"A fascinating book…King sets the reader squarely in the Middle Ages…[His] lively account shows how Brunelleschi's accomplishments were clearly those of a Renaissance man." —Tampa Tribune-Times
"King has taken a historical tale central in science and made it read like a thrilling novel set in the turmoil of the Italian Renaissance." —Hackensack Record
A Book Sense 76 Top 10 Selection

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