Episode notes
Filippo Brunelleschi was born in Florence in 1377, the son of a notary, and became a master goldsmith in the Silk Merchants Guild by December 1398. In 1401 he competed against Lorenzo Ghiberti to design a second set of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery, casting a panel of the sacrifice of Isaac inside a quatrefoil frame. The judges, including Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, deadlocked and asked the two to collaborate. Brunelleschi refused, walked away from sculpture, and went to Rome with Donatello between 1402 and 1404 to measure the ruins. Around 1415 he demonstrated linear perspective with a painting of the Baptistery viewed through a drilled hole and a mirror.
His loggia for the Ospedale degli Innocenti, begun in 1419, set the Renaissance template, followed by San Lorenzo and the Old Sacristy. In 1418 he beat Ghiberti for the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, a hole left open to the rain for 50 years and larger than the Pantheon, to be built without flying buttresses or wooden centering. He used a double shell, hidden tension chains, herringbone brickwork, and an ox driven hoist with a reversible clutch, finishing in 1436. In 1421 he won one of the first patents, for a boat that sank in 1427 with its marble, and in 1434 the stone and wood masters' guild had him jailed. He died in 1446 and was buried beneath the dome.
- Why the 1401 competition brief crowded Abraham, Isaac, an angel, a donkey, and a sheep into one frame
- Opus spicatum, the herringbone pattern that let bricks lock in place at steep angles
- The cantina on the scaffold serving hot food and watered down wine to the crew
- The hoist so ingenious that Leonardo da Vinci later came to sketch it
- Theater machines with hidden pulleys that flew actors playing angels above church congregations