A dome with a view

In the early hours of Easter Sunday, just a week after my 21st birthday, I arrived in Florence with eighty of my college classmates -- beginning a six-month study-abroad program. 

After a couple of hours sleep, a number of us walked from our suburban residence -- alongside the road to Fiesole -- into the center of town.  There, for the first time, appeared before me the towering brick dome of Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral -- known simply as "the Duomo" ("the Cathedral").  I  was awestruck.

I've returned many times to Florence -- never again, alas, as a 21-year-old -- and I've never ceased to be awestruck. 

A couple of weeks after that first arrival, I climbed to the top of the Duomo -- the equivalent of climbing a 40-story building -- muttering in my novice's Italian frequent "scusi's" and "permesso, signore's" as I squeezed past other visitors (at a time when visitors were primarily Italians themselves.)  At the top of the dome, at the base of the lantern, is a balcony from which one views the entire city, and much of Tuscany beyond.  That view is almost an obligatory tourist attraction -- and if the reader has ever visited Florence, he probably has shared my appreciation.

From the garden of the "villa" in which we lived and studied, one could glance up from his books each day and stare at the Duomo in the distance, glistening in the Tuscan sunlight.

Rather than continuing to wax nostalgic, I should say that these memories have been revived by my reading of Brunelleschi's Dome, Ross King's account of how the present cathedral was constructed in the mid-fifteenth century and, in particular, how the challenges inherent in the design and construction of the cathedral's dome were met by the first of the great Renaissance architects, Filippo Brunelleschi.  As King points out, not only was this dome the most ambitious project of its kind since the height of the Roman Empire, but it remains today the world's largest masonry dome -- larger than those of St. Peter's in Rome, St. Paul's in London, and the Capitol in Washington, D.C. 

And it was built without modern technology, by a civilization just beginning its revival from the technological torpor of the Middle Ages.

King's book is interesting from both an historical and an engineering perspective.  He sets forth in clear language the technical problems that Brunelleschi needed to overcome in constructing such an edifice, and his daring decision to build the dome without the use of any interior, supporting, wooden scaffolding -- relying on gravity and mortar alone to hold the rising dome together as it was built.  He describes the engineering difficulties encountered in building a dome of such large dimensions -- and a pointed rather than circular dome -- with none of the visible exterior buttressing that French and German builders used in constructing the pointed arches of Gothic churches.

The author describes the ingenious tools that Brunelleschi designed and built in order to raise and position mammoth blocks of sandstone to unprecedented heights.  He describes the perils of the workmen, as they lay bricks while hanging over the abyss below.

At a less technical -- and more human -- level, he relates the political, artistic, and personal infighting between Brunelleschi and competing architects -- especially his chief rival,  Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose gilded bronze doors on the neighboring Baptistery are one of Florence's artistic wonders.  Although Brunelleschi and Ghiberti built and designed like angels, they squabbled and fought like adolescents. 

The book is a short read, containing a wealth of architectural and engineering information, a story of technological triumph immersed in a sea of political in-fighting, military history, social and economic background, and Tuscan landscapes. 

For anyone who has ever visited Florence, there will be "ah ha" moments, where one thinks "yes!  I remember seeing that!"  In reading how Brunelleschi constructed both an interior and an exterior dome, I remembered my first climb to the top -- how I found myself leaning farther and farther inward, to avoid the slanting roof over my head.  I realized at the time that I was in some sort of space between two shells -- but after reading King's book I have a much clearer picture of just where I had been climbing.  The reader will find many similar enjoyable revelations.

Florence can be enjoyed on many levels.  But Brunelleschi's Dome, by showing the genius and hard work that produced the city's most memorable building, adds greatly to that enjoyment.