Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

“Neri’s model of the dome became an object of veneration in Florence. Standing 15 feet high and 30 feet long, it was displayed like a reliquary or shrine in one of the side aisles of the growing cathedral.”

Brunelleschi became the subject of a modern mythmaking exercise, but this mythologization of architecture did not start with Brunelleschi. Even before Brunelleschi submits his proposal, the previous design for the cathedral is venerated in an almost religious manner. Brunelleschi does not only give the people of Florence their dome, he gives them a figure worthy of their veneration, long after Neri is largely forgotten.

“Growing up in the shadow of Santa Maria del Fiore he would have seen in daily operation the treadwheel hoists and cranes that had been designed to raise blocks of marble and sandstone to the top of the building.”

Brunellschi’s relationship with the duomo has an almost mythic quality. He is born beside the cathedral and grows up in the shadow of the construction site. Later, he dies in the same house. He is bound to the cathedral during the time of its construction, almost raised from childhood with a special bond with the building itself. These details contribute to The Fine Line Between History and Legend.

“He had also begun work on a new cathedral in Milan, an enormous Gothic structure complete with pinnacles and flying buttresses—precisely the sort of architecture to which Neri di Fioravanti and his group had objected.”

Giangaleazzo Visconti, the Duke of Milan, is an enemy of the Republic of Florence in a military, political, and ideological sense. He wages war on Florence, so the Florentines respond with a rejection of everything Milanese. In this way, the design of Santa Maria del Fiore embodies their rejection of Milanese and the Gothic style. The leaders of Florence use Architecture as a Political Statement of a fundamentally Florentine vision of the future.