BRUNELLESCHI'S DOME

Brunelleschi's Dome

Brunelleschi's Dome

Introduction

The book of Brunelleschi's Dome is written by the Ross King and 1434 the year a magnificent Chinese fleet sailed to Italy and ignited the renaissance by Gavin Menzies. Both books are very innovative and authors discussed the histories of innovative eras. These books are dedicated to Italian's historical eras and how innovations were seen in their history. The theme of the books is how some visits make its ancient monuments as in Menzies Ghina (china) found the America. But both authors are disagreed and annoyed because an innovator requires the evidence of his innovated entity.

Critical Analysis

In Ross king famous letter dedicating the Italian version of his treatise on painting to Filippo Brunelleschi, the humanist and soon-to-be architect Leon Battista Alberti recalls, with a rhetorical flourish, the despair he felt when he contemplated the loss of ''so many excellent and divine arts and sciences'' that had been ''possessed in great abundance by the talented men of antiquity.'' (Gavin, 2008)

To Alberti, Brunelleschi's cupola (which is slightly wider in diameter and far exceeds in height the dome of the Roman Pantheon) seemed not merely to equal the achievements of the ancients but to surpass them in its application of the arts of building. Perhaps even more astonishing, and every bit as celebrated at the time as the building itself, were the incredible machines devised by the architect to lift and position the thousands of tons of stone, brick, marble, and wood used in its construction.

Ross King, a British novelist, has produced an entertaining and reasonably well-informed narrative of the personal, political, and technological drama of the cupola's construction. He draws on the rich material provided by the traditional sources, most notably the Antonio Manetti's fifteenth-century biography of Brunelleschi, Vasari's sixteenth-century biographies of several of the participants, and the notoriously self-serving Commentaries of Lorenzo Ghiberti, Brunelleschi's rival and nemesis on this and other projects. He also relies heavily on the more technical scholarship of Frank Prager, Gustina Scaglia, Eugenio Battisti, Rowland Mainstone, and Howard Saalman, whose 1980 monograph on the cupola and its construction remains the definitive treatment of the subject in English. But where the works of these scholars is aimed at a specialized audience, King directs his text at a broad and, frankly, popular audience. The stakes are literally high, as are the workspaces and supporting facilities of Brunelleschi's brilliantly ''self-constructing'' double cupola.

What is especially impressive in these sections, and the ones detailing the system of stone chains and other structural methods devised by the architect, is the clarity and accessibility of the author's descriptions. For example, the author presents a rather uncritical treatment of the architect's fabled (and controversial) Roman sojourn. There is no reason to reject out-of hand the notion that Brunelleschi visited the city or made a study of its ancient monuments. Ross' proposal that Brunelleschi had probably studied the vaulting of the octagonal hall in the Domus Aurea is not supported by contemporary evidence. Finally it should be noted, contrary to the ...