Customer Reviews

Brunelleschi's Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence

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Like Longitude, one of my most favorite books, Brunelleschi's Dome is a small gem. Author Ross King tells the story of the building of the dome atop Santa Marie del Fiore in Florence and along the way, treats you to a rich slice of Renaissance history. Much more than a great story (filled with details about everyday life in 15th century Italy, i.e. what they were eating, how they shopped, how bricks were made) this is a story of a man who used his intuition, faith and genius to propose a revolutionary method of building this famous dome. He used no wooden centering or flying buttresses which was totally radical for the time and he really had no way of predicting whether his plan would work or not. But it did and beautifully. If you're planning on visiting Florence, climb the steps to the top of the dome to see Brunelleschi's handiwork first hand. For example, he and his bricklayers used a unique herringbone pattern when laying the bricks that is clearly visible today. The story is also a human story. All the naysayers, competitiors, political enemies are here along with backbiting, and plotting. Brunelleschi himself had a wily streak and wasn't above lashing out at his competitors. One of the joys of this book is you actually feel like you're getting up each morning to see a day's work on the dome. And it's a very enjoyable way to spend some time. If you're interested, you can visit http://www.vsp.it/cupolalive/ and get a live view from atop the dome in Florence. A fascinating book.

You'd think it was scarcely possible to write yet another book on Renaissance Florence, and yet produce something fresh, original and illuminating. But Ross King has done exactly this - and what's more he's chosen as his subject one of the most familiar, most studied - and most visited - buildings in Europe, Florence cathedral. Every guidebook says that Brunelleschi designed the dome, or cupola, of the cathedral, and that it's the biggest masonry dome ever built. But to learn how it was built, you normally have to turn to some pretty specialised works of art history. Ross King has drawn on these. But he goes much further, and brings the Florence of the first half of the fifteenth century, and especially the people engaged in building the great cathedral, tremendously to life. Brunelleschi himself is portrayed as an argumentative and moody man, with no doubts of his own importance. But he also emerges as one of the most imaginative and daring architects and engineers of any era. His dome is shown to be not just an artistic triumph, and one of the defining structures of Western architecture, but also a technical masterpiece, studied by architects to this day. In many ways this book reminds one of Dava Sobel's "Galileo's Daughter". The style is very different, and Ross King writes of Florence two hundred years before Galileo, but in taking such an original and captivating look at an apparently familiar subject, "Brunelleschi's Dome" stands comparison. Certainly if you enjoyed one, you'll like the other.

Anyone who has been to the ancient Italian city of Florence recognizes the big dome that dominates the city. It is atop the cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, and is larger than the dome of the US Capitol, St. Paul's in London, or even St. Peter's in Rome. It was built before any of them, in 1436. The architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, solved many problems to produce the wonder. He did away with any central scaffold on which to build the dome, and his design for such machines as an ox-powered hoist were innovative and useful. 70 million pounds of brick, mortar, marble, and more were hoisted into the air. The dome gradually rose, while below it were plagues, wars, jealous arguments against Brunelleschi, and financial problems. The book is exciting as it traces the progress of the dome, and it brings out the personality of Brunelleschi well. It gives details of Renaissance life, such as guilds, food, transportation, and brickmaking. Fascinating.

The title of a non-fiction book should be a contract: here, the terms of Ross King's deal are, "I will tell you all you ever wanted to know about the great dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, and, as specified in the subtitle, I will leave you feeling you know how Brunelleschi 'reinvented architecture.'"

I enjoyed this book immensely, but King delivered on neither clause. I found myself puzzling over his technical explanations, rummaging through my library for a superior cutaway of the dome to better visualize his wordy exegesis. Oddly, each of the three well-known books I turned to - Murray's Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, Kostof's History of Architecture, and Hartt's History of Italian Renaissance Art - had precisely the same superb cutaway of the dome within a dome, showing Brunelleschi's Gothic vaulting underneath the classically inspired outer dome. "Mirabile dictu, so that's it!" This is only one of many instances where King created confusion where he might have parted the technical mists, with clearer text or with a better mating of text to illustration.

A corollary to this concern: for a book that has a fair number of illustrations, I found these, for the most part, woefully chosen. I appreciated the reproductions of period etchings and drawings, but these should have been supplemented with additional helps for the text. And at the very close, as a veritable punchline to the short book, King provides one small photograph of the dome in middle distance - no angles, no details, no close-up of the lantern, no full-page, no color. For readers who have neither been to Florence and seen the magnificent Santa Maria del Fiore in its urban context nor seen many illustrations or aspects of the dome, these are galling omissions.

As for the second term of the contract, King simply walks away from the subtitle's claim. Brunelleschi did indeed reinvent architecture, but not with the magnificent engineering feat of spanning the transept of Santa Maria del Fiore. On page 45, King discusses several commissions Brunelleschi won during the period in which he worked on the dome. Two of these, the Oespedale degli Innocenti and the Basilica of Santo Spiritu, literally did reinvent architecture. By investing these structures with rounded arches, classical columns, domal vaults, and classically derived ornamentation and proportions, Brunelleschi recovered for the Renaissance - before others could beat him to it - the architectural accomplishments of classical Rome. In an interesting chapter on Brunelleschi and Donatello's Roman adventure, King provides necessary background for understanding the Florentine achievement.

What happened? Here's my theory: King, a fledgling historian but seasoned novelist, might have submitted a longer draft to his publisher, who may have responded, "you've got two stories here. One is really interesting, has a strong narrative line, tension, characters, villains, obstacles - a brilliant story. Tell the tale of il duomo! And lose that BOOORRRRing stuff about the Foundling Hospital and the other churches." And maybe, just maybe, the dutiful novelist cut his manuscript to the lively story before us. That said, the publisher liked the title, or perhaps even composed it to amplify the puzzling phrase "Brunelleschi's Dome" to novitiates, promising the biggest of the big pictures on the cheap - in well under two hunded profusely illustrated pages.

A strong indictment. But I did indeed like this book a great deal and recommend it without difficulty - with the above qualifications. As I was reading it - actually, I went back and forth between the book itself and the Books on Tape edition, narrated much much too quickly by Richard Matthews, a chipper Brit - it struck me as exemplary "popular history": absolutely compelling as a story, vividly bringing to life Brunelleschi, aspects of his times, his rivals (particularly Lorenzo Ghiberti and his allies), throwing in everything but the kitchen sink - a little bit on war, military engineering, goldsmiths, political skullduggery (actually, King is weak here but provides useful dabs of color: Florence was a boiling pot) - with occasional patches of humor. In the end, this is a sequence of delightfully strung-together anecdotes woven though a book more about engineering - statics, stresses, and lifting machines -than about architecture and design. Filippo may have reinvented site management and construction techniques as well, but that's not the claim of the title, and it's not nearly as sexy as the universal "reinvention of an art form." If you're really interested in the topic, you'll have to look elsewhere to resolve the questions that still go begging once you've finished this brisk, enjoyable romp through 15th Century Florence.

Not many can lay claim to creating a result that is not only a first, proves that which was thought to be impossible was not, and to have their accomplishment remain as awe inspiring today as it was centuries ago. I read the soft cover version of this book so I don't know whether the hardcover offers the same photograph. The inside of the back cover shows the dome as it looks today, even after I had read the book and all the dimensions of the dome it described, the photograph still took me by surprise. The sheer scale of what was built is as breathtaking, as it is beautiful and audacious.

The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in many ways remains unmatched in the engineering feats that were accomplished with its construction. Modern technology and materials have created domes for sports parks that dwarf the span of the dome in this book, but none match it in beauty and none will stand for the almost 600 years this dome has stood.

This is a fascinating story that does not require that the reader be an engineer. There are illustrations that show some of the methods used, and while the book would benefit from having many more, the layperson can grasp the immensity of the undertaking. Vastly oversimplifying what Brunelleschi accomplished was the construction of the largest span of open space with no interior support while it was being built, and a building that did not require the giant flying buttress appendages of cathedrals like Notre Dame in Paris. A dome traditionally was prevented from destroying the building it rose upon by the use of massive exterior supports. A dome by its nature pushes down and outward, no one have ever conceived a dome of this magnitude that could be constructed, much less be completed and remain standing for centuries.

In addition, since none of the traditional scaffolding was in place Brunelleschi had to invent methods for raising countless tons of stone to the dome's starting point 170 feet above the ground, or approximately the equivalent of a 17 story building today. When the dome was completed a lantern that would require the raising of one million pounds of stone was to be raised over the opening, or oculus at the dome's highest point. The story of the dome is worth the book, however the author includes the history that took place while it was built, the politics, the wars, and the rivalries. A read most anyone would enjoy.

The focus of Brunelleschi's Dome is on Renaissance genius Brunelleschi, whose 1400 design revolutionized architecture, tells of a madman determined to achieve his controversial plan. Chapters paint a lively portrait of the man, his times, and the architectural design which would change the world. Leisure readers will find Brunelleschi's Dome as inviting as students of architecture, with a lively tone to the presentation which assumes no prior knowledge of either Renaissance times or architectural history.

It took me several months to really get into this book. Usually I know right away whether a book will grip my imagination and draw me in. "Brunelleschi's Dome" did, however, turn out to be one of the true literary surprises of the year for me. I wrote a term paper about Brunelleschi and the Florence Cathedral waaay back in high school for a technical drafting class. It was that experience, many years ago, that led me to buy the book. Now an architect in private practice, I have the technical and artistic background to appreciate what then was bewildering and rather foreign to me. This book very slowly grew on me, until one evening I couldn't put it down. Once the initial history, setup and definitions were safely read and out of the way, this book really got interesting in a hurry. The portrayal of the unintentional designer who, 500 years later, has come to be one of the recognized geniuses of the Renaissance and a founding father of Western architectural thought is fascinating, surprising and at times downright strange. Brunelleschi's time half a millenium ago is brought to life vividly. The technical descriptions of what are still today considered amazing breakthroughs are well written, informative and enlightening without being unwieldy, self indulgent or too long. This alone is a skill many architectural writers are abysmally deficient in, preferring to fill pages with their own blather and pseudo-language ostensibly designed to make the "rest of us" hold them in awe. Ross King's departure from the language of architecture's current flirtation with trendy academia is refreshing, readable and understandable by those not in the professions of architecture, engineering or building. It is revealing that my 14 year old cousin, a young man with sharp interests in astronomy and rock music, enjoyed this book immensely.

...Ross King does a very good job of describing the political intrigues, money problems, artistic rivalries and other issues surrounding the construction of the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence, Italy - a dome larger than Saint Peter's or the Pantheon. The result is a fascinating book full of detail of the life and times of Filippo Brunelleschi as well as his struggles and genius employed in the building of what would prove to be his defining life work.
Also there is a lot of technical architectural information but the author does not bog the reader down with it.
My only complaint is that in my opinion the book should have contained a lot more photo's (color preferably) of the cathedral itself since this is one of the primary players in the whole story. Fortunately there is one good color photo at end of the book that does show the dome, the "lantern" and the city of Florence in the background. And plenty of other sketches and pictures of the people & devices discussed in the book.
Overall the book helped me appreciate the effort and ingenuity late medieval people put into building these structures without the benefit of modern equipment or structural science.

Very well written in colorful prose with lots of footnotes, but needs better illustrations, perhaps a color plate or two. The descriptions of the machinery the artist invented would have benefited from some precise illustrations. Some photos of the Duomo next time, please. Interior, exterior, and some close ups.

While initially delighted with the book -- it tells a great story about the personalities and construction -- I finished not really knowing the how the dome was constructed; what made it unique. The book could use more diagrams and explanations of the construction methods and, really, more character development. Given 30 more pages, I would have learned something from the book and known more about the people in 1400 Florence. Instead, using a web search engine for "brunelleschi's dome construction" I found my answer from several very good sites.