Brunelleschi believed the secret to good architecture lay in creating "the right proportions." The most revolutionary of the Florentine architects, he transformed the face of the Medieval town with the harmonious, bold, and refreshing structures of the early Renaissance. He was...
[more]Brunelleschi believed the secret to good architecture lay in creating "the right proportions." The most revolutionary of the Florentine architects, he transformed the face of the Medieval town with the
harmonious, bold, and refreshing structures of the early Renaissance. He was an innovator who combined practical engineering with a vision of mathematical perfection. From this intersection arose his rediscovery of the science of perspective, the most potent weapon in his own arsenal as a designer and the catalyst to Renaissance art in general.
Understanding of linear perspective had been lost since the time of the Romans, but the young Brunelleschi recovered it through the study of architecture. He developed a system of drawing that allowed the precise projection of three dimensions onto paper -- objects appeared smaller the farther away they were, and space receded towards a single vanishing point. Building plans could now capture the three-dimensional reality of a project; exact measurements could be accurately represented; rationality could now guide architecture.
For the other arts, too, perspective opened new possibilities: a painting could portray more than one action across the depth of fictional space, or a sculpture could take into account the diminution of objects at a distance. Brunelleschi's invention married art and science and yielded incredible results wherever it was applied. It also made Florence ground zero for the Renaissance. When artists migrated to the Tuscan city-state, they were met by a skyline shaped by Brunelleschi.
His first and greatest addition to that skyline was the dome of the Florence Cathedral, designed and constructed between 1420 and 1436. To solve the problem of weight, Brunelleschi built the dome of two shells, which reinforce each other, rather than one solid wall. By laying the brickwork of the shells in a herringbone pattern, he avoided the need for elaborate wooden supports during construction. All of this ingenuity reflects a bold disregard for Medieval building methods. Brunelleschi invented new ways of doing things, and with them, new notions of beauty based on geometry and order.
Mathematical perfection was the goal of his second large project: the sacristy of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, a work commissioned by the Medici family. Brunelleschi's design was based on abstract blocks of space. Carefully distributing these modules in the nave, apse, and side aisles of the sacristy, he achieved a harmonic balance of interior room. This building also marked Brunelleschi's revival of the elements of classical architecture: round arches, columns, and capitals. In his subsequent projects -- the Pazzi Chapel, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Santo Spirito, and the Palazzo Pitti, among others -- this classical vocabulary became an essential part of his vision.
Brunelleschi guided architecture beyond the narrow streets of the cramped Medieval town and into the crisp and sophisticated light of the Renaissance. He presented the world with a reconception of classical artistic values, in which man and his ingenuity became the measure and the foundation of all things.
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