Filippo Brunelleschi
Brunelleschi began as a goldsmith, studied the ancient ruins of Rome and rediscovered linear perspective. With the dome of the cathedral, the Foundling Hospital and the church of San Lorenzo he created Renaissance architecture: clear spaces, round arches and columns in simple proportions.
Filippo Brunelleschi was born in Florence in 1377, the son of a notary. He trained as a goldsmith and became a master in the goldsmiths’ guild in 1398, learning casting, chasing and sculpture. In 1401 he took part in the competition for the new bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery but lost to Lorenzo Ghiberti. He then turned to architecture and, according to early biographers, travelled to Rome with the sculptor Donatello to measure and study the ancient ruins. Around 1415 he carried out his famous experiments with linear perspective, using mirrors and painted panels to show how a space can be rendered with geometric accuracy on a flat surface.
His great work is the dome of Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, built in 1420–1436 without the timber centring needed for a traditional vault. He used a double shell, brick laid in herringbone bond and rings of stone and iron, and invented hoisting machines for the project. At the same time he designed the Foundling Hospital, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, begun in 1419, whose loggia of round arches on slender columns is usually counted as the first Renaissance building. In the churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito and in the Pazzi Chapel he created clear, measurable spaces in which grey pietra serena marks out a uniform modular system against white walls.
Brunelleschi died in 1446 and was buried in the cathedral, an unusual honour. He is regarded as the founder of Renaissance architecture: he combined the formal language of antiquity with a new mathematical order, and his perspective experiments transformed painting through artists such as Masaccio. Alberti dedicated his treatise on painting to him. For centuries the dome remained a feat of engineering that later dome builders, from Michelangelo to Wren, studied. His way of letting proportion govern an entire space became the model for classical architecture in Europe. Renaissance ideals reached Sweden mainly via Germany and the Netherlands and later through academic training, in which the buildings of Florence were long obligatory destinations on Swedish architects’ study tours.