Filippo Brunelleschi , a Florentine architect and sculptor, can be credited for helping to create the Renaissance style in architecture. His original and daring ideas in architecture, engineering and linear perspective made him the most well-known and respected architect of his time, and the most inventive and gifted artist of all time. His most famous work, the designing and building of the dome for the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence, Italy, revolutionized engineering and construction, and was the largest dome in the world for almost five-hundred years.
Designing and building the dome, lantern, and exedra for the cathedral, occupied the majority of his artistic life. Filippo was the middle of three children born in Italy, to Brunelleschi di Lippo, a lawyer and his wife. At a young age, he was schooled with literary and mathematical backgrounds to follow his father as a civil servant. There he had an apprenticeship as a goldsmith in In , Brunelleschi entered a competition to design a new set of bronze doors to adorn the Florence Baptistery, a minor basilica in Florence.
His competitor Lorenzo Ghiberti won the honors of the commission. From , Brunelleschi and Donatello, a fellow painter and sculptor, traveled to Rome in order to study the ancient Roman ruins. Brunelleschi gained inspiration from Roman architecture, and ancient Roman authors who provided an intellectual understanding for the still visible structures. He also developed a fascination with the Pantheon, studying, climbing, and formulating ideas of how to build a dome.
While in Rome, he began to understand how objects are perceived by the human eye, using correct proportion to the distance in which they are shown in art. Carrying out a series of optical experiments, Brunelleschi was responsible for introducing linear perspective in art, using a unified vanishing point. The building featured a nine-bay loggia, with impressive arches.
In , Brunelleschi competed against Lorenzo Ghiberti, a young rival, and five other sculptors for the commission to make the bronze reliefs for the door of the Florence baptistery. Brunelleschi's entry, "The Sacrifice of Isaac," was the high point of his short career as a sculptor, but Ghiberti won the commission. Ghiberti went on to complete another set of bronze doors for the baptistery with the help of Renaissance giant Donatello. Brunelleschi's disappointment at losing the baptistery commission might account for his decision to concentrate his talents on architecture instead of sculpture, but little biographical information is available about his life to explain the transition.
He continued to sculpt, but architecture was the dominant thread in his professional career. Also unexplained is Brunelleschi's sudden transition from his training in the Gothic or medieval manner to the new architectural classicism. Perhaps he was simply inspired by his surroundings since it was in this period that Brunelleschi and his good friend and sculptor Donatello purportedly visited Rome to study the ancient ruins.
Donatello, nine years Brunelleschi's junior, had also trained to be a goldsmith. In times past, writers and philosophers had discussed the grandeur and decline of ancient Rome, but it seems that until Brunelleschi and Donatello made their journey, no one had studied the physical presence of Rome's ruins in detail.
Although Donatello remained a sculptor, the trip seems to have had a profound effect on Brunelleschi, and he turned firmly and permanently to architecture in the following decade.
Filippo Brunelleschi kept working quite actively with strong devotion until his death on April 15, in Florence, Italy. Famous Architects. Filippo Brunelleschi. Book of the Month. Return to top of page. Loading Comments Lorenzo, by an existing ground plan. The design was tightened up by continuing the aisle in an unbroken band around the transepts, choir, and west front, and by simplifying the ratio of arcade to clerestory from to Brunelleschi's original design incorporated a ring of semicircular chapel niches, visible from the outside, which established a formal congruity between the exterior wall and the interior configuration of the building.
Although Brunelleschi was commissioned to design the Pazzi Chapel in the cloister of S. Croce in , the building seems to have progressed slowly and was not completed until many years after the architect's death. It consists of a domed central square, extended to an oblong by barrel-vaulted side bays, and further elaborated by a square, domed choir and a barrel-vaulted portico. This runs longitudinally across the facade of the building, firmly knitting the new structure into the cloister within which, it stands.
The exquisitely balanced proportions of the design are underscored by the subtle polychromy of the gray moldings set against the paler walls, and enlivened by the glazed majolica roundels on the walls and in the spandrels of the dome. It was partly because of this innovatory system of interior decoration that the Pazzi Chapel proved so influential upon subsequent generations of architects. Unfortunately, Brunelleschi's design for S. Maria degli Angeli was never completed. Consisting of a domed octagonal lantern surrounded by a ring of eight chapels, it would have been the first true centrally planned building of the Renaissance - it marks a high point in Brunelleschi's development as an architect.
In he designed a last centrally planned structure: the lantern of Florence Cathedral.
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