Soaring Innovation in the Quattrocento

The words “genius,” “ingenuity” and “engine” all derive from the same Latin root meaning “beget.” “Genius” implies an extraordinary inborn gift or ability, “ingenuity” suggests natural cleverness and “engine” seems to have originally indicated an ingenious mechanical invention.

Yet, as Ross King reminds us in “Brunelleschi’s Dome,” the brilliant minds responsible for such marvelous edifices as Gothic cathedrals and Roman temples were not celebrated as geniuses by their contemporaries. There was a distinct “prejudice against manual labor on the part of both ancient and medieval authors,” King points out. “Cicero claimed that architecture was a manual art on the same level as farming, tailoring and metalworking, while . . . Seneca mired it in the lowest of the four categories of art, those which he classified as volgares et sordidae, ‘common and low.’ ” But in the Renaissance, this would change, and one of the men responsible for helping elevate the regard in which architects were held was a stubborn, cantankerous, incredibly ingenious Florentine named Brunelleschi.

The construction of Florence’s grand cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore had been going on for well more than a century when, in 1418, the committee overseeing the project held a competition for a plan for its dome: “The problem,” King explains, “was that the [original] model included an enormous dome . . . that, if built, would be the highest and widest ever raised. And for 50 years it had been obvious that no one . . . had any clear idea how to construct it. . . . Even the original planners . . . had been unable to advise how their project might be completed: They merely expressed a touching faith that at some point in the future God might provide a solution, and architects with a more advanced knowledge would be found.”

Such a man was indeed found. Trained as a goldsmith and clockmaker, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) daringly proposed building the vast dome without recourse to the usual system of vaulting it from below during the process of construction. Not only did he figure out how to construct a 143-foot-wide dome so it would not collapse in the process of being built; he also invented new hoists and cranes that enabled workers to lift sandstone beams weighing about 1,700 pounds each and huge slabs of marble--some weighing more than 5,000 pounds--hundreds of feet into the air.

And, thanks to his meticulous safety precautions, there was only one casualty in the 28 years it took to build the dome. One foot wider and considerably higher than the Pantheon in Rome, which had been constructed in the 2nd century AD, Brunelleschi’s dome remained the largest of its kind: larger than the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican built more than a century later by Michelangelo or the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London completed by Christopher Wren in 1710.

There’s an art to writing about how things work, and, in the tradition of Henry Petroski and Tracy Kidder, Ross King has a knack for explaining complicated processes in a manner that is not only lucid but downright intriguing. In addition to his fascinating descriptions of Brunelleschi’s inventions and methods, King fills in the equally fascinating biographical and historical background. We get a good sense of Brunelleschi’s peppery personality (he enjoyed devising elaborate, rather spiteful, practical jokes), his rivalry with the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti and the exciting, tumultuous world of the quattrocento Florentine republic. In an era before patent protection, artists and inventors were often secretive about their methods, and Brunelleschi was particularly fearful that others would steal his ideas. Contra Harold Bloom, the anxiety of influencing was far more prevalent than the anxiety of being influenced.

King notes that the Renaissance involved the recovery not only of the lost literary and artistic treasures of the Classical world, but of valuable Greek treatises on mathematics and engineering. Yet Brunelleschi, who could not read Greek or Latin, seems to have arrived at similarly elegant solutions based solely on his own experiences and observations. Fittingly, he was buried in the cathedral whose dome he built, under the epitaph, Corpus Magni Ingenii Viri Philippi Brunelleschi Fiorentini--”Here lies the body of the great ingenious man Filippo Brunelleschi of Florence.”