Filippo Brunelleschi: The Duomo in Florence

Filippo Brunelleschi - Section of The Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence

It was Filippo Brunelleschi’s offer to construct the dome without centering that weighed most with the authorities in appointing him, but so little trust did they put in him that Ghiberti, his successful rival of the gates, who had no architectural experience, and Battista d’ Antonio, were assigned him as colleagues. This arrangement did not go well with Filippo Brunelleschi’s temperament, Ghiberti retiring to work at his second pair of gates.

The cupola of the Duomo was not entirely constructed till 1434. Domes had been constructed not so long before at Pisa, Siena, and at St. Mark’s in Venice, but none of them on such a grand scale. The diameter was one hundred and thirty-eight and a half feet, and the altitude of the dome itself one hundred and thirty-three feet, measured from the cornice of the drum to the eye of the dome.

The difficulties Filippo Brunelleschi was facing were increased by the adoption of the drum on which the Duomo is raised, and through which it is lighted, while an important step is thus made in the progress of dome-design. There is a separation between the inner and outer shell of the dome, but they are concentric, or nearly so.

As the altitude of the dome in itself is too great for good proportion internally or for decorative effects, the result might have been finer had the inner dome parted company from the outer with a lower centre, but that would have increased the thrust at the top of the drum. And it was Brunelleschi’s aim to reduce that to a minimum, hence the acutely pointed form of both domes.

Begun after 1436, under Filippo Brunelleschi’s superintendence, the lantern was only completed in 1461, after his death, and the gallery, round the drum on the outside, only on one of the eight sides at a later date. Filippo Brunelleschi left a model for the lantern, with instructions that it should be formed of large masses of marble to prevent the cupola from opening, believing that its pointed form was rendered more stable by loading it heavily. The construction of the Duomo is Gothic in principle, as the work is done by the eight main ribs and by the sixteen lighter intermediate ribs between which the vaults are stretched.
The largest work of Filippo Brunelleschi, the Duomo became the symbol of Florence and granted the eternal life to the artist.

Filippo Brunelleschi