I've visited my share of churches in Europe and always been impressed with vast soaring arches made of stone ....and the spaces in between filled with stone. And, when we first came to Florence and saw the cathedral - Santa Maria del Fiore was suitably impressed ...but maybe more by the campanille alongside (designed and part built by Giotto). What I did take away with me was the story that the architect of the cathedral cupola had taken on the difficult task of building this massive dome ...fitting it to the existing structure and managed to build it without scaffolding (or an armature) inside. To me this was wondrous and it was only much later when I read other books about Brunelleschi that I began to understand how this would be possible but to also understand the genius of the man.
The current book works hard to give due credit to Brunelleschi...credit that they clearly think he has been denied.....especially for his machines. Though I remember reading in Vasari's Lives about Brunelleschi's wondrous machines and devices he built for festivals etc. (Vasari was clearly an admirer). I recently read the book "The Innovators before Leonardo" by Plinio Innocenzi,and he truly sets Brunelleschi in pride of place and shows what an innovator he was. In fact, many of the drawings that Leonardo is famous for were clearly copied from other works that in turn were based on the inventions of Brunelleschi. Where Leonardo excelled was that he was so good with his sketches ....couldn't help himself...... he was just so good that even when he copied his versions were incomparably better than what he copied from. And he often toyed around with variations of his own. There are probably three main inventions of Brunelleschi that are teased out in great detail in this book. The first is of his main hoist which was operated by oxen (or maybe a horse for a time) and which employed an ingenious screw at the base allowing the rolling of the rope around a drum to be reversed (I guess to lower a load) without the oxen having to change direction. The second invention is of a lateral positioning crane that allows a load to be moved horizontally (after it has been hoisted to the right level by the main hoist) and positioned accurately. The third invention is his use of iron and wood and stone "chains" at the base of the main dome (the drum) to hold it together and do away with ugly buttresses. Though maybe this was not a totally original invention because the Romans 1400 years before were linking blocks with metal inserts ...and the Greeks 300 years before them. The other significant innovation was his use of a double wall structure that was self supporting as it rose from the base (Basically a horizontal circle .....that rose higher and higher). I was intrigued by the constant referral to the lack of an armature (supporting scaffolding in the centre of the dome/cupola to support it during construction). But there was clearly some sort of scaffolding inside the dome in the latter stages anyway to support the horizontally positioning cranes. Much of the book is academic in style ...searching out sources and clearly some things are less than clear from the sources but overall I found it quite fascinating.
It seems that to be the main driving force behind such a project one also had to be a fairly forceful character and Brunelleschi seems to have been this...maybe not the most pleasant of people. And he had his failures ......his boat to transport stone from Pisa was apparently a flop and his endeavours to flood the city of Lucca and make it an Island (they were at war with Lucca) had some success but at the cost of also flooding the camp of the Florentines. I probably would have learned a lot more if I had not already read the book, mentioned above, by Innocenzi.
It was also interesting to note that despite Brunelleschi's innovations and the number of drawings of his works that were in circulation, his inventions didn't seem to catch on and were more or less lost over time. Clearly an impressive character and the book does him some justice.I found it a little annoying sometimes when Italian words like "mozetto" were used without explanation and even when I googled them they seemed to be archaic with no explanations, I give it three stars. ( )