Early Renaissance architectural innovation
Review of Brunelleschi's Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence by Ross King
This book is about the construction of Florence’s Great Cathedral, the dome of which surpassed in size Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome, the one that had stood for about 1300 years as a marvel of the world. Brunelleschi’s accomplishment stood until the 20th century, when new materials enabled architects to develop in altogether different directions.
The core of the story is how Brunelleschi, as an exemplar of the early Renaissance, studied the Roman examples and then experimented in ways that allowed him to surpass them. Technically speaking, he analyzed the structure of Hadrian’s concrete dome in Rome, a balance of its materials strength and the molding of caissons (box shapes, lessening its weight). At that point, the construction methods of Gothic Cathedrals were on the way out: there would be no flying buttresses to support the dome.
Brunelleschi solved the longstanding problem of Florence’s dome – designed and partially constructed over a century earlier without a clear means of executing it – by reinventing architectural engineering. In other words, he was presented with a large structure with a gaping hole that had to be filled with an unprecedentedly large dome. Its execution, which took more than a decade, made him an early Renaissance hero.
It was here that the book began to lose me. King goes into excruciating detail about Brunelleschi's avoidance of "centering", that is, the construction of a temporary wooden scaffold for support inside the dome, which would have used far too much of one of the most valued commodities of the era, hard wood. To do so, he invented a pulley system to raise the stones; this occupies an entire chapter. He also made many other innovations that may interest only very serious students of historical architecture. Furthermore, there are pages of descriptions of the type of bricks he used and even custom-designed to fit the geometry of the dome as it tapered (he describes their geometric shapes as in a catalogue). Even worse, I did not always find his technical descriptions very clear, and had to re-read them several times to get it.
Moreover, King goes into a lot of biographical territory that is neither documented nor known even from hearsay. The book is peppered with phrases like "he must have thought", "he must have realized", "he must have resented" etc. That makes this bio too speculative for me, lacking in academic discipline. Brunelleschi was a difficult character with lots of enemies and mysteries about him, of course, but we just don't know enough about his machinations to say much that is definitive – so if you don't have something that proves, or directly indicates, that he thought/felt one way or the other, any interpretation that seeks to characterize it is the stuff of fiction.
That being said, King knows both the technical details and the larger historical context, and most of the time he can express his thoughts well, in brilliantly evocative style. So, in a turn of phrase that is marvelously dense and masterfully accurate, he evokes this or that trait of the early Renaissance and what it meant. You get the politics, science, and art as they are evolving, as well as the techniques of war and even transportation. This is a great pleasure and kept me going. This is personal: I was looking more for trends and context than technical engineering details; other readers may enjoy the latter more.