Listen to part of a lecture in an architecture class

Churches, especially the large ones we call cathedrals, are among the most interesting examples of European architecture. That was certainly true in Italy in the 1400s especially in the case of the Cathedral of the Italian city of Florence.

Actually, construction of the Florence cathedral began over a century earlier. Florence had a booming economy then based largely on its highly profitable wool industry. The cathedral was kind of meant to represent the city's success. Although a cathedral is obviously a place of religious worship. It wasn't the religious authorities alone that were in charge of the construction. For example, a trade group, the wool workers’ guild, took responsibility for maintaining the cathedral. To design the building. The city of Florence initially hired a man named Arnolfo di cambio as the architect, we know the roof that Arnolfo designed for the cathedral featured a large, round dome, and that he even built a model of the cathedral with a dome in its roof. It was pretty common at that time for architects to make models, highly detailed models, so people could get a good idea of what the finished building would look like. These models were also often quite large. One model for a church in another Italian city was bigger than a house.

Back to Arnolfo, he died not long after construction began, so we aren't quite sure how he planned to build the dome, and unfortunately, the model he made collapsed under its own weight a few years later, not a good sign for the project as a whole. Other people took over the project after Arnolfo’s death, but several decades later, around 1367, the building still sat, only partly finished. That year, Florence's citizens voted to approve an even more ambitious plan for the Cathedral. The new plan was to build the largest dome in Italy, around 50 meters in diameter and about 60 meters above the ground. The problem was, nobody at that time had the engineering knowledge or skills to build a dome that huge. The people of Florence just believed they'd somehow figure it out eventually, but it was another 50 years before anyone did. In the meantime, the cathedral sat unfinished, with its walls standing but totally open to the elements, rain, wind, you name it.

The technical problem of building the dome was finally solved in the early 1400s by an architect named Filippo Brunelleschi. Brunelleschi grew up in Florence and was trained as a goldsmith. So he made sculptures from metals like gold, silver and bronze. As a young man, he entered a competition to make bronze sculptures for another important building in Florence called the baptistery. The baptistery was a prominent landmark, which meant the sculptures would be very visible.

Brunelleschi and another sculptor were the finalists, but the committee chose the other candidate. We don't know exactly why Brunelleschi lost, but it might have been because the sample sculpture he submitted consisted of several pieces of bronze joined together, whereas the winning artist's sample was all one piece, the multiple pieces of brunelleschis design would have required a lot more bronze and would have been more expensive for the baptistery.

After this loss, Brunelleschi apparently abandoned being a sculptor and left Florence for Rome. As we discussed earlier this term, the ancient Romans, living more than 1000 years earlier, had quite sophisticated technical skills, including in architecture, that knowledge was lost over the centuries. But Brunelleschi, while in Rome, he learned about the city's history, helped excavate some ruins and studied the ancient buildings that were still standing. One such building was the Pantheon. The Pantheon is known for its massive dome, and it was probably the Pantheon that revealed to Brunelleschi the architectural solution for his hometown's cathedral. So he came back to Florence with a plan for the cathedral's dome, and the committee approved it, and as you're about to see, Brunelleschi architectural methods were truly remarkable and ultimately successful.