Brunelleschi’s Dome

Anyone alive in Florence on August 19, 1418, would have understood the significance of the competition announced that day concerning the dome for the city’s magnificent cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, already under construction for more than a century. The proposed dome was regarded as all but possible to build: its design shunned the flying buttresses that supported cathedrals all over Europe. The dome would literally need to be erected over thin air. Of the many plans submitted, one stood out. It was offered by a goldsmith and clock maker named Filippo Brunelleschi, then forty-one, who would dedicate the next twenty-eight years to solving the puzzles of the dome’s construction. In the process, he did nothing less than reinvent the field of architecture.