Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King ~ my review

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.