The subject
About Brunelleschi’s Dome
Brunelleschi’s dome crowns the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and, six centuries on, remains the largest masonry dome ever built.
When Florence’s cathedral was designed, no one yet knew how to close the enormous octagonal opening left for its crown — nearly forty-five metres across, far too wide for any wooden centering the age could build. For decades it stood open to the sky. In 1418 the wool guild held a competition; a goldsmith and clockmaker named Filippo Brunelleschi won it with a method he refused, at first, to fully explain.
His solution, built between 1420 and 1436, was audacious. He raised the dome as two shells, an inner and an outer, bound together and light enough to stand on their own — laying the bricks in a self-supporting herringbone pattern so that each ring could close without falling inward. No great timber scaffold was ever needed; he even designed the hoists and machines that lifted the millions of bricks into place.
Eight white marble ribs spring from the octagonal drum and climb across the red-tiled surface to a marble lantern at the summit, added after Brunelleschi’s death to his own design. Inside, the vast cup was later painted with Vasari and Federico Zuccari’s swirling Last Judgment. The whole rises to about 114 metres — still the tallest thing in Florence, which once forbade any building to exceed it.
I drew it as that memory. The ribs and the lantern are there in loose ink line, but the colour is set free — the warm red of the tiles and the blue of the Tuscan sky dropped in as washes and splatter, the wonder of the thing rather than its measurements.
Brunelleschi’s dome is usually taken as the building that opens the Renaissance — proof that a modern mind, reasoning from first principles, could outdo the ancients. At that scale, in masonry, it has never been repeated since.
See also · Architectural Sketchbook
Florence Cathedral Sensation ·
Arch of Constantine ·
Arch of Septimius Severus
