Brunelleschis Dome (23 page)

T
HE FIRST STONE
of the dome’s lantern was consecrated by Cardinal Antoninus (later St. Antoninus), the new archbishop of Florence, in March 1446. Filippo barely lived long enough to see the ceremony, for he died a month later, on April 15, after what appears to have been a short illness. He died in the house where he had lived for his entire life with his adopted son and heir, Buggiano, at his bedside. He was sixty-nine years old and had worked on the site of Santa Maria del Fiore for over a quarter of a century.

Filippo was the first of the three
capomaestri
to die. Battista d’Antonio survived him by five years. By this time Battista was comfortable and well-to-do, able to provide fine jewelry for his wife, a dowry for his daughter, and a house for himself in the country. He died at the end of 1451, aged sixty-seven, after having worked on the site of Santa Maria del Fiore for his entire adult life.

Lorenzo Ghiberti was to live to the ripe old age of seventy-seven. In 1447, a year after Filippo’s death, Ghiberti completed the ten scenes that make up his great masterpiece, the “Doors of Paradise,” though the framing and gilding of these bronze doors would not be finished for another five years. It had been a Herculean task, involving the designing, modeling, and casting of hundreds of human figures in various architectural and natural settings, all of which display a skillful use of perspective (and also reveal the influence of one of Filippo’s innovations). So revered did these doors become — it was Michelangelo, an ardent admirer, who would later name them the “Doors of Paradise” — that the Guild of Cloth Merchants decreed that they, and not those completed in 1424, should be the ones to face the cathedral. And so Lorenzo’s first set of doors was moved to the north side of San Giovanni, the spot for which they originally had been intended.

Lorenzo had been richly rewarded by the Cloth Merchants, having continued to enjoy over the years his large annual salary of 200 florins — double what Filippo was paid each year for his work on the dome. As a result, in 1442 Lorenzo had been able to purchase a country estate with a large manor house. Unlike Filippo, who died in the house where he was born, and who was careless about his financial affairs, Lorenzo had been interested throughout his life both in acquiring property and in making investments. Besides his house and his workshop in Florence — the latter of which was a large and profitable business employing as many as twenty-five apprentices — he owned a vineyard in the country and he had bought a farm in the hills above Florence.
*
Ever the businessman, he had also invested in a flock of sheep near San Gimignano, in the Val d’Elsa. The manor house, however, was truly his crowning glory. It was quite literally fit for a lord, since it came complete with a tower, a moat, surrounding walls, and a drawbridge. By the late 1440s, after leaving his workshop in the hands of the younger of his two sons, Vittorio, he had retired to this grand old house. His wife, Marsilia, the daughter of a poor wool comber, must have been astonished at the size and style of her new surroundings. And it was here, in the winter of 1447-48, that he reflected back over his own life and, anxious to preserve his reputation for posterity, penned his autobiography. When he died in December 1455, he was the most influential sculptor of his age, and it is not altogether without justification that he boasts in his autobiography that very few important works of art executed in Florence had not been devised by his hand.

According to Vasari, the sudden death of Filippo brought tremendous grief to the people of Florence, who appreciated him more in death than they had in life. Even his enemies and rivals were said to have mourned him. But unlike Michelangelo, who would die before the dome of St. Peter’s was finished, Filippo had at least lived long enough to see his great cupola (with the exception of its lantern) brought to completion.

Funeral obsequies were held in Santa Maria del Fiore. Surrounded by candles and swathed in white muslin, Filippo reposed beneath the great vault that he had finished building a decade earlier. Thousands of mourners paraded past, including the wardens of the Opera, the Wool Guild consuls, and masons from the cathedral. Then the candles were snuffed and the body removed to the campanile, where it would remain for another month while a dispute ensued regarding where the
capomaestro
should be buried. This dispute suggests that Vasari exaggerates when he claims that even Filippo’s enemies were in mourning. The delay was probably caused by an anti-Brunelleschi faction who did not wish to see him buried in style, perhaps the same men responsible for jailing him a dozen years earlier. Even in death Filippo was the subject of controversy.
*

His supporters eventually won the day. The Signoria decreed that instead of being placed inside his family’s sepulcher in the newly rebuilt church of San Marco, where both of his parents were buried, he should have the honor of being entombed inside the cathedral itself, rather like a pharaoh buried inside a pyramid he had spent his lifetime constructing. He was duly laid to rest in the cathedral on May 15, 1446. There is a fine irony to the fact that, although Filippo did not achieve his ambition of building round the cathedral a series of chapels to house the bones of Florence’s wealthiest citizens, he himself should have come to be buried there. This was indeed a great honor. The only other person interred inside the cathedral was St. Zenobius. His ancient remains had been placed there only a few years earlier in a vault specially built by Filippo.

The
capomaestro
was not laid to rest in a special chapel, however, but in a tomb under the south aisle, near to where Neri di Fioravanti’s tantalizing model had stood enshrined for so many years. So modest was this tomb (perhaps at the behest of his enemies) that it was only rediscovered during archaeological work on the cathedral in 1972. There is no grand monument to the
capomaestro
, only a simple marble tomb slab — the sort of slab that was cut up for use on the dome whenever marble was scarce. The inscription reads,

C
ORPUS
M
AGNI
I
NGENII
V
IRI
P
HILIPPI
B
RUNELLESCHI
F
IORENTINI

(“Here lies the body of the great ingenious man Filippo Brunelleschi of Florence”)

It refers to him, therefore, not directly as an architect but as a man of mechanical genius, alluding to the machines he invented in order to raise the dome.
*
His mechanical ingenuity is also stressed in the epitaph composed by the chancellor of Florence, Carlo Marsuppini, a renowned poet, and placed elsewhere in the cathedral. A plan was afoot shortly after his death to decorate the site of his tomb with marble plaques showing some of these machines — an exercise that would have taught us much about their design — but the commission, regrettably, was never carried out.

In 1972 Filippo’s bones were exhumed from where, for over five hundred years, they had lain beneath the simple tomb slab. By then the skeleton had all but crumbled to dust, poignantly illustrating the bones’ stark contrast with the mighty vault looming overhead. Forensic tests none the less discovered that, true to contemporary accounts, Filippo was short in stature (no more than 5 feet 4 inches) even by the standards of the fifteenth century. He possessed, however, an above-average cranial capacity. We know what he looked like because shortly after his death the Opera commissioned from Buggiano a plaster cast of his head and shoulders. This bust with its closed eyes and grimacing mouth is now on display in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, where visitors can come face to face with the
capomaestro
, who looks barely larger than a child. The Opera also commissioned a marble bust, once again from Buggiano, who portrayed Filippo in the attire of an ancient Roman. It was placed to the right of the cathedral’s door, near to one of Arnolfo di Cambio, with whom the great adventure of the cathedral had begun exactly a century and a half earlier.

These official tributes may strike us as somewhat modest in light of all that Filippo accomplished, but it is safe to assume that no European architect or engineer had ever before earned such renown either during his lifetime or in the years after his death. Today we are so used to celebrating the brilliance of architects like Michelangelo, Andrea Palladio, and Sir Christopher Wren that it is hard to imagine a time when architects and architecture were not esteemed. But the great architects of the Middle Ages had been virtually anonymous. The name of the master mason who constructed the abbey of St. Denis — the first building ever raised in the Gothic style — remains unrecorded, and the three masons responsible for the ill-fated cathedral at Beauvais are known in the documents simply as the First Master, the Second Master, and the Third Master. A little more is known about Arnolfo di Cambio and Neri di Fioravanti, though history does not record where or when either of them was born or died, nor do we have any indication of their personalities or aspirations.

Part of the reason for this anonymity was a prejudice against manual labor on the part of both ancient and medieval authors, who assigned architecture a low place in human achievement, regarding it as an occupation unfit for an educated man. Cicero claimed that architecture was a manual art on the same level as farming, tailoring, and metalworking, while in his
Moral Letters
Seneca mired it in the lowest of the four categories of art, those which he classified as
volgares et sordidae,
“common and low.” Such arts were mere handiwork, he claimed, and had no pretense to beauty or honor. As such, architecture ranked even lower than the “arts of amusement,” which included such things as fashioning machinery for stage plays.
¹

Brunelleschi’s death mask.

Filippo’s work at Santa Maria del Fiore set architects on a different path and gave them a new social and intellectual esteem. Largely through his looming reputation, the profession was transformed during the Renaissance from a mechanical into a liberal art, from an art that was viewed as “common and low” to one that could be regarded as a noble occupation at the heart of the cultural endeavor. Unlike the builders of the Middle Ages, Filippo was far from anonymous, and his feat in raising the dome without a wooden centering was celebrated far and wide. Latin poems were composed in his honor, books were dedicated to him, biographies written, busts carved, and portraits painted. He became the subject of myth.

Above all else, Filippo was praised for his
ingegno
, “genius,” a term invented by the Italian humanist philosophers to describe a natural ability for original invention.
²
Before Filippo’s time the faculty of genius was never attributed to architects (or to sculptors and painters either, for that matter).
³
But Marsuppini’s epitaph refers to Filippo as possessing
divino ingenio,
”divine genius,” marking the first recorded instance of an architect or sculptor being said to have received divine inspiration for his work. For Vasari, the
capomaestro
had been a genius sent from heaven to renew the moribund art of architecture, almost paralleling how Christ had come to earth to redeem mankind. In his unquestionable brilliance the writers of the Renaissance found their proof that modern man was as great as — and could in fact surpass — the ancients from whom they took their inspiration.

E
ACH MORNING THE
masons working on the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore arrived on the site in semidarkness and, after having their names recorded on the gesso board, started their labors by climbing several hundred stone steps to the working level. Their feet would rasp on the sandstone treads as they began this familiar but arduous ascent, clutching their tools, flasks of wine, and the leather pouches that held their lunches. Their climb through the core of the building was illuminated by a system of lighting that Filippo — mindful as ever of his workmen’s safety — devised to prevent them from stumbling and falling in the dark stairwell.
¹

In all, four sets of stairs rise from the ground to the top of the tambour. A staircase giving access to the top of the drum, and from there into the dome itself, was built into each of the four enormous piers on which the dome rests. During construction, two of these were used for ascent and the other two for descent, thereby doing away with the problem of tool-laden masons bumping into one another in the confined spaces. The men clearly needed a good level of fitness to keep their jobs, since by the 1430s they were forced to scale the equivalent of a forty-story building before starting work each day.

Originally it was feared that these four stairwells might weaken the piers, obviously a disastrous result considering that they take the bulk of the dome’s weight, which has been estimated at 37,000 tons.
²
In the 1380s a group of master masons had recommended bricking up the stairwells and finding another way for the laborers to reach the working levels. But these fears proved unfounded, and fortunately, no such work was ever done. Today it is therefore still possible to follow in the steps of the masons who scaled the heights of the dome.