Filippo Brunelleschi

Biography

The bronze panel of the “Sacrifice of Isaac” is today in the Bargello Museum in Florence. It is Brunelleschi’s competition piece of 1401, which was not melted down with the others but kept in memory of the contest. Lorenzo Ghiberti won it.

Filippo was born in Florence in 1377 (by other accounts, in 1376), the son of the notary Brunellesco di Lippo Lapi. His mother, Giuliana Spini, came from a well-known family. He was being prepared for his father’s career and was taught Latin and mathematics, but he took to drawing, and his father placed him in a goldsmith’s workshop. There he learned casting, chasing, niello, the setting of stones and enamelling. In 1398 he joined the Arte della Seta, the silk merchants’ guild, which also included goldsmiths. His first known works are small silver figures for the altar of Saint James in Pistoia Cathedral.

The competition of 1401 was announced by the cloth merchants’ guild, the Arte di Calimala, for the second pair of bronze doors of the Baptistery. Each entrant was to cast a single relief on the sacrifice of Isaac. According to Antonio Manetti, the judges could not choose between Brunelleschi and Ghiberti and proposed that they work together, but Filippo refused to share the commission. Ghiberti himself wrote of a unanimous decision in his own favour. Manetti, a pupil and the first biographer of Brunelleschi, wrote his life only some thirty years after the master’s death, so the details of the dispute are hard to verify. Brunelleschi did not give up sculpture at once: the wooden “Crucifix” for Santa Maria Novella is dated to about 1410, and some scholars also attribute to him the figure of Saint Peter for Orsanmichele.

Around 1402, according to Vasari, he went to Rome with Donatello to sketch and measure the ancient ruins, and the Romans took them for treasure hunters. Historians dispute whether the journey took place then: his stay in Rome is securely documented only in 1432.

He began designing the Foundling Hospital (Ospedale degli Innocenti) in 1419, commissioned by the silk merchants’ guild. The loggia, about seventy metres long, consists of nine semicircular arches on columns with composite capitals; the grey stone, pietra serena, stands out against the white plaster. Until 1427 he was listed as its architect, but he was rarely on site, and others completed the building. The round glazed terracotta medallions with babies were added later and were made in the workshop of the della Robbia family.

From 1420 came the building of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, the chief undertaking of his life. He won the competition of 1418, but the work was at first entrusted to him together with Ghiberti. The octagonal dome is about 42 metres across. It consists of two shells joined by ribs and horizontal rings; the bricks in the masonry are laid in a herringbone pattern. There was no scaffolding from the ground: hanging platforms were used. Brunelleschi convinced the doubters with calculations and a model shown to the citizens. To lift loads he devised a special hoist, which Leonardo da Vinci later drew. More than four million bricks went into it. The dome was completed by 1436, and the lantern above it was begun shortly before the master’s death and finished only around 1461.

In the same years he built the church of San Lorenzo, begun in 1420, and the Old Sacristy beside it, a nearly cubic room about eleven metres wide under a dome with twelve ribs. The Pazzi Chapel at Santa Croce was commissioned around 1429 and built slowly, and the portico in front of it most probably came after his death. He began the oratory of Santa Maria degli Angeli, octagonal inside, in 1434, but the money for the building was taken by the Florentine government, and it remained unfinished. The church of Santo Spirito, his last major work, was begun in 1444 by one account; by another it was being designed as early as 1434. The columns for its façade were delivered ten days before his death. The Palazzo Pitti was once attributed to him, but its construction began only after his death.

Manetti relates that Brunelleschi carried out experiments in perspective between 1415 and 1420: he painted a view of the Baptistery on a small panel, made a hole in it and had the viewer look through it at the reflection in a mirror. The sky on the panel was replaced by a polished silver plate in which real clouds drifted. Both panels are lost. I would be more cautious about saying that he “invented” perspective: treatises on optics existed earlier, and how exactly he applied it we know mostly from retellings.

In 1421 he received what was, in all likelihood, one of the first patents, for a river boat to carry marble. The ship Il Badalone, built in 1427, sank on its first voyage along with a sizeable part of his fortune. In 1434 he was arrested on a complaint from the guild of stone and wood masters for practising without membership of the guild, but was soon released. He had no children of his own; in 1415 he adopted Andrea Cavalcanti, known as Il Buggiano.

Brunelleschi died on 15 April 1446. He is buried in the crypt of the Cathedral of Florence, beneath the dome he built. A statue of him was later placed in the square in front of the cathedral: he looks up at his dome.