Filippo Brunelleschi

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Filippo Brunelleschi bigraphy, stories - Italian architect, artist and engineer

Filippo Brunelleschi : biography

1377 – April 15, 1446

Filippo Brunelleschi ( 1377 – April 15, 1446) was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for his discovery of perspective and for engineering the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplishments also include other architectural works, sculpture, mathematics, engineering and even ship design. His principal surviving works are to be found in Florence, Italy.

As an architect

There is little biographical information about Brunelleschi’s life to explain his transition from goldsmith to architect and, no less importantly, from his training in the gothic or medieval manner to the new classicism in architecture and urbanism that we now loosely call the Renaissance and of which Brunelleschi is considered the seminal figure. By 1400 there emerged an interest in humanitas which contrasted with the formalism of the medieval period, but initially this new interest in Roman antiquity was restricted to a few scholars, writers and philosophers; it did not at first influence the visual arts. Apparently it was in this period (1402–1404) that Brunelleschi and his friend Donatello visited Rome to study the ancient Roman ruins. Donatello, like Brunelleschi, had received his training in a goldsmith’s workshop, and had then worked in Ghiberti’s studio. Although in previous decades the writers and philosophers had discussed the glories of ancient Rome, it seems that until Brunelleschi and Donatello made their journey, no-one had studied the physical fabric of these ruins in any great detail. They gained inspiration too from ancient Roman authors, especially Vitruvius whose De Architectura provided an intellectual framework for the standing structures still visible.

Commissions

Brunelleschi’s first architectural commission was the Ospedale degli Innocenti (1419–ca.1445), or Foundling Hospital. Its long loggia would have been a rare sight in the tight and curving streets of Florence, not to mention its impressive arches, each about 8 meters high. The building was dignified and sober; there were no displays of fine marble or decorative inlays. It was also the first building in Florence to make clear reference—in its columns and capitals—to classical antiquity.

Soon other commissions came, such as the Ridolfi Chapel in the church of San Jacopo sopr’Arno, now lost, and the Barbadori Chapel in Santa Trinita, also modified since its building. For both Brunelleschi devised elements already used in the Ospedale degli Innocenti, and which would also be used in the Pazzi Chapel and the Sagrestia Vecchia. At the same time he was using such smaller works as a sort of feasibility study for his most famous work, the dome of the Cathedral of Florence.

Of the two churches that Brunelleschi designed, the Basilica of San Lorenzo, (1419-1480s) and Santo Spirito (1441–1481), both of which are considered landmarks in Renaissance architecture, the latter is seen as conforming most closely to his ideas.

Santa Maria del Fiore: The Florence Cathedral

Santa Maria del Fiore was the new cathedral of the city, and by 1418 the dome had yet to be defined. When the building was designed in the previous century, no one had any idea about how such a dome was to be built, given that it was to be even larger than the Pantheon’s dome in Rome and that no dome of that size had been built since antiquity. Because buttresses were forbidden by the city fathers, and because it was impossible to obtain rafters for scaffolding long and strong enough (and in sufficient quantity) for the task, it was unclear how a dome of that size could be constructed without it collapsing under its own weight in the process. Also, the stresses of compression were not clearly understood at the time, and the mortars used in the period would only set after several days, keeping the strain on the scaffolding for a very long time. In 1418, the Arte della Lana, the wool merchants’ guild, held a competition to solve the problem. The two main competitors were Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, with Brunelleschi winning and receiving the commission.