The dome in Florence is completed
Filippo Brunelleschi succeeds in vaulting the dome over Florence Cathedral without scaffolding from the floor. In the same year the cathedral is consecrated by the pope.
The feat became the symbol of the Renaissance: man who, through knowledge of antiquity and mathematics, can surpass the ancients.
Florence’s new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, was begun in 1296 to designs by Arnolfo di Cambio. In the 14th century it was decided that the crossing should have an octagonal dome, larger than any built since antiquity, and a model of the church was approved in 1367. The problem was that nobody knew how it could be built. The opening was so wide that there was not enough timber for ordinary centring, and the Florentines did not want to use flying buttresses as in northern Europe. In 1418 a competition was announced. Filippo Brunelleschi, a trained goldsmith, had studied the ancient ruins in Rome after losing the competition for the Baptistery doors, and he claimed that he could vault the dome without scaffolding.
Work went on from 1420. Brunelleschi made the dome double, with a thick inner shell and a thinner outer one, connected by eight large ribs at the corners and smaller ribs in between. Staircases run between the shells up to the top. The bricks were laid in a herringbone pattern in which upright bricks locked the horizontal ones, so that each ring supported itself while the mortar set. Chains of stone, iron and timber hold the dome together like the hoops of a barrel. He also devised new hoisting machines, including an ox-driven hoist that could reverse direction without the animals turning round. The lantern on top, to his design, was not begun until 1446, the year he died.
The dome aroused wonder even while it was being built. Leon Battista Alberti dedicated the Italian version of his book on painting to Brunelleschi and praised the dome as a work without equal, even in antiquity. Brunelleschi was granted the unusual honour of burial in the cathedral itself. The gilded ball on the lantern was put up in 1471 by the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, where the young Leonardo da Vinci was an apprentice. The dome became the model for Michelangelo’s dome over St Peter’s and thus for domed churches all over Europe. In Stockholm too, the Katarina Church was given a dome over the crossing in the 17th century, one of the clearest Swedish examples of the Renaissance dream of the centrally planned church.