The New York Times bestselling, award winning story of the
construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and the
Renaissance genius who reinvented architecture to build it.
On August 19, 1418, a competition concerning Florence's magnificent new
cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore was announced: "Whoever desires to make
any model or design for the vaulting of the main Dome....shall do so
before the end of the month of September." The proposed dome was
regarded far and wide as all but impossible to build: not only would it
be enormous, but its original and sacrosanct design shunned the flying
buttresses that supported cathedrals all over Europe. The dome would
literally need to be erected over thin air.
Of the many plans submitted, one stood out--a daring and unorthodox
solution to vaulting what is still the largest dome in the world. It was
offered not by a master mason or carpenter, but by a goldsmith and
clockmaker named Filippo Brunelleschi, then forty-one, who would
dedicate the next twenty-eight years to solving the puzzles of the
dome's construction. In the process, he reinvented the field of
architecture.
Brunelleschi's Dome is the story of how a Renaissance genius bent men,
materials, and the very forces of nature to build an architectural
wonder we continue to marvel at today. Award-winning, bestselling author
Ross King weaves this drama amid a background of the plagues, wars,
political feuds, and the intellectual ferments of Renaissance Florence
to bring the dome's creation to life in a fifteenth-century chronicle
with twenty-first-century resonance.
