Renaissance sculptor and engineer

Brunelleschi started working in the slums of amidst the slums of the Santa Croce quarter. There, young Brunelleschi learned the skills of mounting, engraving and embossing. He also studied the science of motion, using wheels, gears, cogs and weights. 

He then spent the next ten years living rough in Rome with his good friend, the sculptor Donatello, studying the ruins of the great city. He was especially interested in Roman engineering, fixed proportions, and Roman vaults. The construction of the Pantheon, especially the dome, fascinated him. Brunelleschi dedicated himself to understanding how it stayed up, which included pouring Roman concrete over a massive timber frame. This understanding and study helped him raise the dome of the cathedral Santa Maria de Fiore in Florence.

Few men have left a legacy as monumental as Filippo Brunelleschi. He was the first modern engineer and a problem-solver with unorthodox methods. He solved one of the most fantastic architectural puzzles and invented his way to success, and only now is he receiving deserved recognition as the greatest architect and engineer of the Renaissance.

He was an architect and engineer who pioneered early Renaissance architecture in Italy. His major work is the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) in Florence (1420–36), constructed with machines that Brunelleschi invented expressly for the project.

Brunelleschi rediscovered the principles of linear perspective, which were known to the Greeks and Romans but buried along with many other aspects of ancient civilisation during the European Middle Ages.

Brunelleschi demonstrated his findings with two painted panels, now lost, depicting Florentine streets and buildings. From Manetti’s descriptions, it is clear that Brunelleschi had understood the concept of a single vanishing point, toward which all parallel lines drawn on the same plane appear to converge, and the principle of the relationship between distance and the diminution of objects as they appear to recede in space. By using the optical and geometric principles upon which Brunelleschi’s perspective devices were based, the artists of his generation produced works of astonishing realism. On two-dimensional surfaces, they created extraordinary illusions of three-dimensional space and tangible objects so that the work of art appeared to be either an extension of the natural world or a mirror of nature.

Although Brunelleschi brought to light the laws governing perspective construction, the humanist architect Leon Battista Alberti codified them for the first time. In 1435, Alberti set them down in Della pittura (On Painting), his famous treatise on Painting. The treatise included a warm dedication to Brunelleschi—undoubtedly an expression of Alberti’s debt to his friend’s revolutionary discovery.

Architectural Career

Solving complex engineering and static problems was another facet of Brunelleschi’s wide-ranging abilities. His most remarkable feats of technological ingenuity were symbolised when he invented the machines to construct the soaring dome of the Duomo and its lantern (a structure set on top of the dome to help illuminate the interior), and his scheme for the construction itself represents his most extraordinary feats of technological ingenuity.

By 1418, the cathedral (Duomo) construction had reached the stage at which the technical problems of constructing a vault above the enormous dimensions of the octagon had to be solved. These problems had involved previous generations of cathedral architects in bitter disputes.

Brunelleschi devised a successful method for vaulting the dome, invented the machinery necessary to carry it out, and designed the structure’s crowning lantern and its lateral tribunes (semicircular structures). He was named chief architect (capo maestro) of the dome project in 1420 and remained in that office until he died in 1446.

In 1420, a decision was reached in favour of Brunelleschi’s model, which demonstrated that the dome could be constructed without the traditional armature or wooden skeletal framework by placing the brickwork in herringbone patterns between a framework of stone beams; this included the study and knowledge of angles, science and engineering calculations. Ancient Romans developed this construction technique and had possibly been first observed by Brunelleschi on his supposed trip to Rome (c. 1401) with his friend, the sculptor Donatello, when both of these giants of early Renaissance art are believed to have studied classical sculpture and architecture.

The imagination and the engineering calculations that led to the successful erection of the dome established Brunelleschi’s fame.

Therefore, Brunelleschi is seen as an artist who is still profoundly dependent on local forms of architecture and construction but with a vision of art and science based on the ideal’s humanistic concept.

He dedicated his knowledge to modular construction, geometric proportions, and symmetrical planning.

The San Lorenzo structures are considered keystones of the early Renaissance architectural style. In form, the church did not depart from the traditional basilican church with a nave (central aisle), side aisles, and apse (a semicircular projection at the end of the nave). Brunelleschi added a new vocabulary to the conventional format using his own interpretation of antique designs for the capitals, friezes, pilasters (rectangular columns set into the wall), and columns. Further, his design of the church as a whole was one of unusual regularity, where the separate parts of the church rationally corresponded to each other and created a profound visual and intellectual harmony.