Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

Filippo Brunelleschi is the subject of Brunelleschi’s Dome. While the book charts the process by which the dome was constructed, Brunelleschi emerges as the driving force of this project through sheer personality. Brunelleschi is presented as a prototypical Renaissance figure: one who sifts through the ruins of Rome to drag ancient knowledge into the modern era. Brunelleschi himself is a genius, the book suggests, but he is not without flaws. He is paranoid and secretive, refusing to tell anyone about his plans for the dome for fear that they might steal his ideas. He is bitter and jealous, developing an intense rivalry with figures, like Lorenzo Ghiberti, whom he believes to have wronged him in some fashion. Brunelleschi is arrogant and entitled, resenting anyone who attempts to encroach on his authority to build the dome. As such, the dome itself exists as a physical embodiment of the man who made it. The dome is a mysterious, defiant symbol of a new school of thought, a rebuke to the Gothic ideals of the past, and a celebration of Florentine exceptionalism. The dome is Brunelleschi, just as Brunelleschi is the dome.

King’s depiction of Brunelleschi relies on biographies by figures like the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) and the mathematician and architect Antonio Manetti (1423-1497).