Filippo Brunelleschi is best known for his design of the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. Apparently, he was an unkempt and cantankerous old goldsmith and sculptor, very paranoid and suspicious of his fellow artisans - even for fifteenth-century Florence. But it was not just the design for which he deserves accolades. The manner by which he proposed to erect the dome was so radical that he was labeled a madman. Even more startling was that he refused to reveal the details of how he intended to suspend the dome without traditional supports to the committee before he was awarded the commission, because of his fear that his new method would be stolen by other artisans. It remains the largest dome ever constructed using traditional materials.Until 1436 when the dome was completed, the traditional method of building domes had been to support them with rigid wooden scaffolds (called centering) that had to remain in place as long as a year, until the mortar dried and it would be self-supporting. It was a remarkable feat of engineering, having the largest span ever constructed of bricks and mortar, spanning more than 140 feet, exceeding St. Pauls in London and St. Peters in Rome.
The judges of the competition were naturally reluctant to take Brunelleschi at his word without a demonstration of how he could build the structure without centering, and there is an apocryphal story that he told them they should award the project to whomever could get an egg to stand on its end. No one could do it, of course, until Brunelleschi came forward, smashed one end of the egg and showed how it could be done. Crying foul, his detractors argued it wasnt fair, to which Brunelleschi replied that had they been inventive enough to figure out as he had how to get the egg to stand on its end, they would have been able to understand how he could build the dome without centering. The fact is that the structural strength of the egg had fascinated people for centuries. It has enormous longitudinal strength. It is almost impossible to break an egg by squeezing end-to-end. Of course, now all of you will run to the kitchen to verify this, leaving a wake of eggs smashed all over.
Construction of the cathedral began in 1296, but the competition for the dome was won by Brunelleschi in 1420 after a bitter competition with Lorenzo Ghiberti, Brunelleschis rival. Political intrigue, jealousy, and paranoia characterized the story. To build the dome, all sorts of mechanical devices had to be invented and Brunelleschi designed most of them. More than seventy million pounds of bricks (each individually designed for the herringbone pattern that was the secret to the structural integrity of the dome), sand, marble and other material had to be hoisted an immense distance off the ground. In fact, when the dome was close to completion, the workers had daily to climb the equivalent of a forty-story stairway before they could begin work. The dome was completed just before the designers death. It was an engineering feat whose structural daring was without parallel.
His architectural wonder has survived numerous lightning strikes and all sorts of stresses except one he could never have imagined. Recently, cracks were discovered in the dome that had been caused by the heavy vehicular traffic around the cathedral, so all traffic has been banned in that area. Another remarkable geologic problem was discovered only recently. Apparently, part of the cathedral was constructed over an underground river. Yet, it still stands.
King, author of the novel Ex Libris, tells a compelling and informed story rich in period detail.
