Although we may think extreme sports and stunts, spectator
violence, hazing, and inventors’ pitches to the Shark Tank belong to this current
age, they are not new. In the 1400s men boasted how many men in a row they
could leap over; they conspired to play humiliating tricks on others; and
executions were popular public spectacles. And certainly professional
competition, trade secrets, and mean jealousies are not new either. One need
only peruse Ross King’s book, Brunelleschi’s
Dome, to read story after story detailing the competitive business and
personalities of the early-1400s construction of Florence, Italy’s famous Il
Duomo, dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.
Brunelleschi’s Dome
is subtitled How a Renaissance Genius
Reinvented Architecture, and that is the point of all the engineering
statistics, architectural challenges, and personal stories. Between 1420 and
1436, Brunelleschi constructed the world’s first octagonal dome without
interior wooden supports or external buttresses. At 376 feet high and almost
150 feet in diameter, Il Duomo remained the largest dome in the world for more
than 400 years. Trained as a goldsmith, untrained as engineer or architect,
Brunelleschi was clearly a genius, albeit a stubborn, hot-headed, secretive one.
To construct such a dome, he had to invent machines,
methods, and safety measures. His ox-hoist invention succeeded, but not all his
inventions did. For design of a ship to transport marble on the Arno River from
Pisa to Florence, Brunelleschi was given the world’s first-ever patent for
invention. The ship was called Il
Badalone, or The Monster, and it sank with its valuable cargo not even
halfway to Florence. Brunelleschi lost the equivalent of ten years of his
salary in this disaster.
Ross King details many ingenious designs of the day as well
as much political intrigue. Filippo Brunelleschi’s archrival was Lorenzo
Ghiberti, but he had other adversaries in various competitions for prestigious
artistic and architectural contracts. I found discussion of other projects by
Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Giotto interesting, as well as literary
cross-references, such as Brunelleschi’s study of Dante, Boccaccio’s devoting
one of his Decameron tales to
Giotto’s appearance, Manetti’s 1480s biography Life of Brunelleschi, and others.
Just as Greek essayist Plutarch had criticized an emperor’s
palace, and Roman authors Pliny and Frontinus had blasted the Seven Wonders of
the World as foolish displays of wealth, Ross King brings up the possibility of
critics claiming biblical Tower of Babel motives for builders of Il Duomo. Were
Florentines trying to reach God in heaven in their own power? King says the
fall of the Tower of Babel “is likewise an architectural version of the Fall of
Man.” [page 101] King cites Il Duomo’s most likely critic, Leon Battista
Alberti, who had called Egypt’s Pyramids “monstrous” and “insane,” as instead,
praising Brunelleschi. “Alberti justifies the gigantic dimensions of the dome
because they reveal both evidence of man’s God-given power to invent and the
superiority of Florentine commerce and culture.” [page 102]
Florence’s system engendering fierce political competition
for architectural projects certainly mirrors aspects of society today. This
fascinated me. Technical engineering measurements, physics principles, and such,
bogged me down a bit. That Brunelleschi, a master goldsmith, probably
researched ancient Roman ruins to self-educate in engineering is a
delight-inspiring proposal. Sociological information about plagues, wars,
workers’ habits and threats, and the role of the Catholic Church set an
interesting backdrop for the high drama of Brunelleschi’s many challenges. Ross
King has footnoted and indexed his account. Considering how well-documented the
book is, I was dismayed to find little mention of Brunelleschi’s relationship
with his patron Cosimo de’ Medici, perhaps because he was in exile from Florence
during most of the dome’s construction. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading this
book for an appreciation of man’s ingenuity and civilization’s progress. I hope
to someday appreciate Brunelleschi’s magnificent dome in person.
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