Filippo Brunelleschi

Filippo Brunelleschi (born 1377, Florence [Italy]—died April 15, 1446, Florence) was an architect and engineer who was one of the pioneers of early Renaissance architecture in Italy. His major work is the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) in Florence (1420–36), constructed with the aid of machines that Brunelleschi invented expressly for the project. Most of what is known about Brunelleschi’s life and career is based on a biography written in the 1480s by an admiring younger contemporary identified as Antonio di Tuccio Manetti.

Early years

Brunelleschi was the second of three sons of Ser Brunellesco di Lippo Lapi, a Florentine notary of some distinction, and Giuliana Spini. After training as a goldsmith and sculptor, he applied for registration in the Arte della Seta and in 1401 was designated a master. Brunelleschi competed with Lorenzo Ghiberti and five other sculptors in 1401 to obtain the commission to make the bronze reliefs for the door of the Baptistery of Florence. Brunelleschi’s trial panel depicting The Sacrifice of Isaac is the high point of his career as a sculptor. His ability to arrest narrative action at the moment of its greatest dramatic impact and the vigorous gestures and animated expressions of the figures account for the merit of his panel. It was Ghiberti, however, who was declared the winner of the commission. Brunelleschi’s extreme disappointment at losing the commission probably accounted for his decision to concentrate his talents on architecture instead of sculpture.

While still in the early phase of his architectural career (probably c. 1410–15), Brunelleschi rediscovered the principles of linear perspective known to the Greeks and Romans but buried along with many other aspects of ancient civilization during the European Middle Ages. Brunelleschi demonstrated his findings with two painted panels, now lost, depicting Florentine streets and buildings. From Manetti’s descriptions it is clear that Brunelleschi had understood the concept of a single vanishing point, toward which all parallel lines drawn on the same plane appear to converge, and the principle of the relationship between distance and the diminution of objects as they appear to recede in space. By using the optical and geometric principles upon which Brunelleschi’s perspective devices were based, the artists of his generation were able to produce works of astonishing realism. On two-dimensional surfaces they were able to create extraordinary illusions of three-dimensional space and tangible objects, so that the work of art appeared to be either an extension of the real world or a mirror of nature. Although the laws governing perspective construction were brought to light by Brunelleschi, they were codified for the first time by the humanist architect Leon Battista Alberti. In 1435 Alberti set them down in Della pittura (On Painting), his famous treatise on painting, which included a warm dedication to Brunelleschi—undoubtedly an expression of Alberti’s debt to his friend’s revolutionary discovery.

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Architectural career

Solving complex problems of engineering and statics was another facet of Brunelleschi’s wide-ranging abilities. The machines that Brunelleschi invented for the construction of the soaring dome of the Duomo and its lantern (a structure set on top of the dome to help illuminate the interior) and his scheme for the construction itself represent his greatest feats of technological ingenuity. The cathedral was begun in 1296; during the 14th century the nave was completed and work commenced on the complex octagon of the east end. By 1418 construction had reached the stage at which the technical problems of constructing a vault above the enormous dimensions of the octagon had to be solved. These problems had involved previous generations of cathedral architects in bitter disputes. It was Brunelleschi who worked out a successful method to vault the dome, invented the machinery necessary to carry it out, and designed the structure’s crowning lantern and its lateral tribunes (semicircular structures). He was named chief architect (capomaestro) of the dome project in 1420 and remained in that office until his death in 1446.

In 1418 the cathedral officials announced a prize for models presenting technical devices for the construction of the dome, which had been designed in the late Gothic period as an eight-sided vault of pointed curvature without exterior buttresses (structures built for additional support). Brunelleschi, along with many others (including his archrival, Lorenzo Ghiberti), submitted a model. In 1420 a decision was reached in favour of Brunelleschi’s model, which demonstrated that the dome could be constructed without the traditional armature, or wooden skeletal framework, by placing the brickwork in herringbone patterns between a framework of stone beams. This construction technique had been evolved by the ancient Romans and had possibly been first observed by Brunelleschi on his supposed trip to Rome (c. 1401) with his friend the sculptor Donatello, when both of these giants of early Renaissance art are believed to have studied classical sculpture and architecture. In 1420 Brunelleschi’s dome was begun; in 1436 the completed structure was consecrated, and, in the same year, his design for its lantern was approved. (The lantern, however, was not completed until after his death.) The imagination and the engineering calculations that led to the successful erection of the dome established Brunelleschi’s fame.

Mid-20th-century criticism modified the earlier approach to Brunelleschi’s buildings as the foundations of Renaissance architecture. They are now understood in the context of the influence on him of the classical elements in 11th- and 12th-century Tuscan Romanesque and proto-Renaissance buildings such as San Miniato al Monte. Brunelleschi, therefore, is seen as an artist still profoundly dependent on local forms of architecture and construction but with a vision of art and science that was based on the humanistic concept of the ideal. This is borne out by his first major architectural commission, the Ospedale degli Innocenti (Hospital of the Innocents, or Foundling Hospital). Although the portico of the hospital is composed of many novel features, morphologically it still is related to traditions of Italian Romanesque and late Gothic architecture. The truly revolutionary aspects of the building emanated from Brunelleschi’s intuitive sense of the formal principles of the classical art of antiquity. The Innocenti facade offered a new look in Florentine architecture and a marked contrast to the medieval buildings that preceded it. Its lingering late-medieval echoes were subordinated to the new style that provided the facade with its antique air: a wall delicately articulated with classical detail (such as Corinthian capitals, pilasters, tondi, and friezes), modular construction, geometric proportions, and symmetrical planning.

By the early 1420s Brunelleschi was the most prominent architect in Florence. At this time the powerful and influential Medici family commissioned him to design the sacristy of San Lorenzo (known as the Old Sacristy, to distinguish it from Michelangelo’s “new” 16th-century sacristy in the same church) and the Basilica of San Lorenzo itself. Work was begun in 1421. The sacristy was completed (without its decoration) by 1428. Construction on the basilica was halted at that time but began again in 1441 and lasted into the 1460s.

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The San Lorenzo structures are considered keystones of the early Renaissance architectural style. In form the church did not depart from the traditional basilican church with nave (central aisle), side aisles, and apse (a semicircular projection at the end of the nave). What Brunelleschi added to the conventional format was a new vocabulary using his own interpretation of antique designs for the capitals, friezes, pilasters (rectangular columns set into the wall), and columns. Further, his design of the church as a whole was one of unusual regularity, where the separate parts of the church rationally corresponded to each other and created a profound visual and intellectual harmony.

Brunelleschi designed the Old Sacristy (originally intended as a Medici family mausoleum) as a cube vaulted with a hemispherical dome. The structural and decorative units that delineate the architectural surface of the walls of the Old Sacristy and of the basilica proper are of particular elegance and restraint characteristic of Brunelleschi’s work at this time.

About 1429 another wealthy and influential Florentine family, the Pazzi, commissioned Brunelleschi to design a chapel adjacent to the monastic Church of Santa Croce that was intended to be a chapter house (a place of assembly for monks to conduct business). Work probably did not begin before 1442; the building still was not complete in 1457. Brunelleschi used mathematical modules and geometric formulas for the plan and elevation of the Pazzi Chapel, as he had in San Lorenzo, but he arranged the space in a more complex and sophisticated manner in the later building. A hemispherical dome covers a central square, which is extended on either side so that the square forms the centre of a rectangle. The minor spatial compartment, opening off a third side of the main square, is a corresponding square apse covered by a dome and containing the altar. The creamy wall surface of the Pazzi Chapel is marked off in geometric patterns by dark gray stone. The clarity, coolness, and elegance for which Brunelleschi’s architecture is noted are seen in this small, harmoniously proportioned chapel.

Another example of Brunelleschi’s experiments with central planning is one of his most enigmatic buildings, Santa Maria degli Angeli, built for the Camaldolese monastery in Florence. It was begun in 1434 but left incomplete in 1437 (remaining in an unfinished state until the 1930s, when it was completed in a controversial manner). The building was planned as a central octagon with a 16-sided exterior. A chapel opened on each of the eight sides of the interior octagon, terminating in a deeply recessed apse at the end. Eight niches were cut into alternate facets of the exterior walls. Santa Maria degli Angeli was Brunelleschi’s most revolutionary design. It represented a perfectly centralized structure, more formally consistent than the Old Sacristy.

Brunelleschi’s Church of Santo Spirito in Florence was designed either in 1428 or 1434. Work on the church was begun in 1436 and proceeded through the 1480s. A basilican church with a centrally planned eastern end, Santo Spirito is ringed by semicircular chapels opening off the dome-vaulted side aisles, the transept, and the apse. These chapels accounted for a unique aspect of the design, for the exterior walls of the church were meant to conform to the shape of the chapels in a sequential series of curves. After Brunelleschi died, however, the protruding round chapels were walled over with the flat conventional exterior now visible. Rather than creating its walls as flat surfaces onto which are pressed thin rectilinear members (pilasters), a style perfected in San Lorenzo and the Pazzi Chapel, Brunelleschi designed Santo Spirito with a feeling for its weight, gravity, and plasticity. The building, therefore, can be associated stylistically with Santa Maria degli Angeli, and also with the four semicircular tribunes above the sacristies of the Duomo. Brunelleschi’s model for these tribunes was approved in 1439; the first one was completed in 1445, and the remaining three were finished in the 1460s. They are composed of deeply concave semicircular niches crowned with a shell device and separated by thick walls to which have been applied Corinthian half columns with projecting entablatures. In form and in mood, the tribunes were closer to monumental antique architecture than anything constructed in Florence up to that time, and they foreshadowed the strong profiles and massive grandeur of the buildings of Leon Battista Alberti and Donato Bramante.

Brunelleschi’s role as architect of residential buildings is difficult to assess, although Manetti relates that he was summoned from far and wide to design palaces. No documentary evidence exists for the houses and palaces with which biographers and scholars have credited him, the most significant of which (all in Florence) are the Pitti Palace, a rejected plan for the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, and the Palazzo Bardi-Busini. Each of these palaces contains novel features that are tempting to attribute to Brunelleschi’s inventiveness, but definitive proof of his influence or authorship has not been offered.

The manifold architectural abilities of Brunelleschi also are attested to by his military architecture, some of which is partially extant. He is associated with the building and rebuilding of fortifications in Pisa, Rencine, Vicopisano, Staggia, Castellina, Rimini, and Pesaro. In 1430 he was involved in a plan to convert the city of Lucca into an island by building a dam and deflecting the Arno River.

Brunelleschi was active through the early 1440s and probably continued to be until shortly before his death. He died in Florence and was buried in the Duomo.