How Brunelleschi Engineered Florence’s Iconic Dome

No one who trav­els to Flo­rence can help see­ing the dome of the Cathe­dral of Saint Mary of the Flower. That’s true not just because of its sheer loom­ing phys­i­cal pres­ence over the rest of the city, but also because of its impor­tance as an achieve­ment in var­i­ous kinds of his­to­ry, from that of engi­neer­ing to archi­tec­ture to reli­gion. Its sto­ry is told by art his­to­ri­ans Beth Har­ris and Steven Zuck­er in their new Smarthis­to­ry video above, which begins in the year 1417. At the time, Zuck­er explains, Flo­rence had a “huge” prob­lem: the ground­work for its ambi­tious­ly large cathe­dral had been laid a cen­tu­ry before, but nobody knew how to build the dome for which its plans called.

The assump­tion, says Har­ris, was that “by the time they had to build it, they would fig­ure out how to do it,” a reflec­tion of both the more relaxed speed of con­struc­tion in the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry, as well as a pace of inno­va­tion that must have felt rapid­ly on the increase.

Such a struc­ture had­n’t been built since the Pan­theon in antiq­ui­ty, the out­do­ing of which would, at least in the­o­ry, con­firm Florence’s recep­tion of the torch of civ­i­liza­tion from Rome. But none of the tra­di­tion­al tech­niques could sup­port a dome of this size, atop so high a tow­er, dur­ing con­struc­tion. Sal­va­tion even­tu­al­ly came in the unpromis­ing form of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi, an archi­tect, sculp­tor, and gold­smith with­out much of a résumé — but, cru­cial­ly, with a deep under­stand­ing of the Pan­theon.

“Brunelleschi real­ized that hemi­spher­i­cal domes func­tion in a self-sup­port­ing man­ner if they’re con­struct­ed out of self-sup­port­ing con­cen­tric cir­cles,” Zuck­er says, and his chal­lenge was to use that knowl­edge to build an octag­o­nal dome. This involved design­ing two domes, a thick inner one cov­ered by a thin out­er one. Drop €30 on a tick­et, and you can ascend the stairs through the inter-dome gap your­self. There the walls reveal the her­ring­bone brick pat­tern that kept the struc­ture sta­ble; at a larg­er scale, those bricks form struc­tur­al ele­ments, much like over­sized ver­sions of the stones used to build arch­es since time immemo­r­i­al. Regard­ing almost any pic­ture of Flo­rence, your eye may go straight to the cathe­dral, drawn both to the dome and to the splen­dor of its oth­er era-mix­ing archi­tec­tur­al fea­tures. But only from the inside can you under­stand how it all works.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

How Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi, Untrained in Archi­tec­ture or Engi­neer­ing, Built the World’s Largest Dome at the Dawn of the Renais­sance

The Beau­ty & Inge­nu­ity of the Pan­theon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Pre­served Mon­u­ment: An Intro­duc­tion

Why Hasn’t the Pantheon’s Dome Col­lapsed?: How the Romans Engi­neered the Dome to Last 19 Cen­turies and Count­ing

How Design­ing Build­ings Upside-Down Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture, Mak­ing Pos­si­ble St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, Sagra­da Família & More

His­to­ri­an Answers Burn­ing Ques­tions About The Renais­sance

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.