SPEAKER_00 0:09

Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Hello, and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay, and for those of you who don't know me, I am an art history PhD student. And when I wrote this intro a week and a half ago, I wrote that I'm very, very jet lagged, which I was. I'm not anymore. Now I'm just regular tired. For those of you who don't follow the podcast's Instagram, which you should, you may have wondered where I have been for these two months. Nah, let's be real. You probably don't care, slash you forgot. No offense taken, it's a busy time of year. My two-month hiatus was on account of a two-month research trip that I just took to Italy. I got back about a week and a half ago, and I do not travel with a microphone, y'all. I spent seven weeks with the carry-on, and if you think a microphone fits in that, you're wrong. However, today's episode is directly inspired by my travels. To be perfectly honest, I needed a topic that was relatively easy to write uh while traveling, and for which materials were freely available despite not having my usual library resources. I mean, I was constantly in libraries and archives, but that was all dissertation related. And if I have to talk about anything related to my dissertation in any language between now and the new year, I might just go crazy. So we're not doing any of that today. Before we get started, I do want to note that you may have noticed, if you're a previous listener, that the sound quality of today's episode isn't as good as previous ones because I forgot to pack my good microphone when I left St. Louis in October, and I wasn't going to make you wait for an episode until I got back. So I pulled my old microphone out of the drawer and I have put this baby back to work. But we will be back to the good Yeti microphone soon. You also may notice that my voice sounds a bit weirder than usual, and that is because I am getting over a very bad cold, which was almost certainly the result of sitting next to a sneezing child on an airplane for 10 hours. But hey, we can't all be perfect, and I've already passed my cold on to my dad. So, circle of life. For today's episode, I am going to be covering a classic. I was actually very surprised that there weren't more podcast episodes dedicated to this very topic, because it's a big one, literally and figuratively. The Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy. I chose today's topic because I was recently in Florence for the first time in about seven years, and every time I walked by the cathedral and saw Brunelleschi's dome, it made me do a double take. I must have walked by that dome ten times a day, and I never, not once, failed to stop for just a few minutes to just look at it. And you know, try not to get pickpocketed, but mostly look at it. Without exaggeration, Brunelleschi's Dome is probably one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time. And you do get a sense of that when you look at it. It's huge. Also, Brunelleschi was a little bit of a drama queen. He had a little attitude, and that's always fun to talk about. What is a little bit less fun to talk about is hundreds of thousands of bricks, but hey, you take the good with the bad. This, my friends, is where I tell you stuff about a thing. The Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy, also known as the Duomo, the Cupola, or quite simply as Brunelleschi's Dome. The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore is the third largest cathedral in the world, clocking in at about 502 feet long and 295 feet wide at its crossing. It is huge. It's one of those buildings that makes you feel like a tiny insignificant ant. And I think that that's precisely what they were going for. Like any other major building project in uh, you know, history, or at least the majority of them, the Cathedral of Florence was a work in progress over the course of several hundred years. I am not going to go into the whole history of the church itself, but a crash course is in order. As is the case with most big churches in history, the cathedral as we now know it replaced a previous church that in turn had replaced the church before it. The origins of a church on this particular location in Florence date back to the 4th century, with another iteration to follow in the centuries after. The first of those churches, the one built in the 4th century, was dedicated to Saint Lawrence, San Lorenzo. The later church was dedicated to a saint that I have personally never heard of, named Saint Reperata. At least I think that's how you pronounce her name. I'm not quite sure. It's spelled R-E-P-A-R-A-T-A. Saint Reparata. Who, according to Wikipedia, was a Catholic martyr of the 3rd century AD, who was tortured to death during the persecution of the Roman Emperor Deccius. The more you know. Ooh, her persecutors tried to burn her alive? Yikes! But she was saved by a shower of rain. She was then compelled to drink boiling pitch. Holy scheiza. When she again refused to apostasize, she was decapitated. Oh boy. So she definitely deserves to have a church named after her. For sure. Get it, girl. The remains of these two previous churches, the Basilica of San Lorenzo and the Church of Santa Parata, are still at least somewhat visible in, you know, pieces, ruins, in the subterranean crypt of the current church, where excavations have uncovered a wide array of materials relating to those previous churches, such as mosaics, sculptures, and flooring. As Florence attracted more and more people, though, it became a bigger and bigger city. That's how that works. And in doing so, the city generated the need for a newer, larger church. Also, nearby cities in the region were all building impressive new churches, like Siena, for example. And by God, Florence was going to build a church too, and it was going to be bigger than all those other churches. Competition. Fueling artistic innovation since always. Sadly, from my girl Reparata, Florentine officials decided that this new church that they wanted to build would not be rededicated to that saint. They tried to burn her alive, they made her drink boiling pitch, and then they decapitated her, and she can't even get a cathedral named after her. My goodness. The new church would instead be dedicated to Saint Mary, Jesus' mother. The church's name, Santa Maria del Fiore, means Saint Mary of the Flower. This was appropriate because the ever-present symbol of Florence that you will see all over the city is a fleur-de-lis, or at least to us what looks like a fleur-de-lis. If you tell the Florentines it's a fleur-de-lis, they'll probably punch you in the face. In fact, it is an abstract version of the Iris Fiorentina, which grows in the area around the city. So Santa Maria del Fiore makes a lot of sense. Arnolfo Di Cambio, which is very hard to say with the cold, he was a big deal. He worked as both a sculptor and an architect throughout his career, but this commission to design and build the Florence Cathedral was what emphasizes just how significant and well-regarded he was. He wouldn't have received this degree of commission if he wasn't the bee's knees, okay? Arnulfo Di Cambio equals badass sculptor architect man of the late medieval period. In many ways, Arnolfo Di Cambio was a predecessor to the Renaissance period, which started about 50 years after he was active. This is true in both what Arnolfo Di Cambio created and in what he created slash endeavored to create, but never finished. Santa Maria del Fiore and its dome are the perfect examples of that happening. What Arnolfo Di Cambio started, or at least designed, it would take a very special person to finish. Arnolfo Di Cambio designed a massive structure. So for those of you who aren't familiar with church terminology, in terms of architecture, architectural church terminology, which I assume is most of you, think about the layout of this church in its simplest form as a Christian cross. So you've got your long vertical and your short horizontal near the top. The long horizontal is called the nave, in terms of, you know, when it's put into architectural form. Arnolfo DiCambio designed this structure to have three naves. So that long horizontal was comprised of three main aisles. These three aisles, these three naves, were then crossed by the short arm of, you know, the hypothetical cross, which in architectural terms is called a transept. Where those two things intersected, where the transept intersects the nave, it creates a crossing. That's generally where the altar goes, and the altar is the most important space in a church. So it's generally signaled architecturally, traditionally at least, by a dome. In Arnolfo DiCambio's design, this dome would be octagonal, meaning it would have eight sides, and it would rise over the altar, obviously. So we're talking massive structure with three naves, a massive transept, and an octagonal dome. Domes have been utilized as a way to demarcate a space that is exceptionally important, whether it be holy, secular, or I don't know, somewhere in between, for a very long time. In fact, they've been utilized by any number of civilizations over the course of known history, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day capital buildings, including that of my great state of Wisconsin, Gil Badgers. The English word dome originates from the Latin word domus, which means house. Over the centuries and millennia, the word domus became conflated with a house of God, aka a church, which is why you often hear cathedrals in Italy, sometimes called Duomos, because they are the house of God in that particular area. There might be other churches around, but this is like the big church. Many of these massive structures do indeed have domes, though you shouldn't let that make you think that domes are inherently Christian. In fact, the opposite is true. Domes have appeared in any number of contexts over the course of history, including religious environments like cathedrals, mosques, synagogues, as well as secular buildings like Roman palaces and, as I said before, modern state capitals. It's a generally impressive structure that carries any number of symbolic meanings. Oh hi Gus Gus. He just leaned against me. He's making me feel special. Hi, buddy. Gus is snoring so loud right now, right beside me, so if you can hear that, you're welcome. You've been blessed. By the time Arnolfo DiCambio comes into the picture in 1294, domes are not only a status symbol of a city, they are the status symbol of a city. Whatever city can build the biggest dome gets bragging rights until, you know, some other city can top them. Of course, the dome is also a way to symbolically give thanks to God and the saints through the building of this incredible church. There was always a very strong overtone of local pride in being able to build something better than the Joe Schmo's, you know, 200 miles away. And although this might seem really stupid looking back, like honestly, who cares whose dome is 10 feet higher than someone else's dome, really? Y'all are dying off of the black plague and you're worried about a damn dome. But these rivalries were ingrained over the course of generations, given that it took so freaking long to build these dang things. Case in point, the Florence Cathedral. Working from Arnulfo Di Cambio's design, builders broke ground on the new cathedral in 1296. And work went swimmingly until about 1302, when Arnolfo Di Cambio went off and died. That date is, of course, contested. Some people think he died in 1310, but it doesn't really matter. Like I hope he had eight extra years with his family. That would be awesome. But construction processes were so slow back then that whether or not Arnolfo died in 1302 or 1310, the cathedral was still in the very, very earliest stages of its construction. Also, construction and destruction tend to go hand in hand. And the building of the Florence Cathedral required the destruction of numerous streets, churches, and housing complexes to make way for this greatly expanded structure. It's all massive. Whether you're destroying something or building something, it's all complicated. So when the main architect dies, it's hard to keep building, because there's no number two for that. There's no sort of VP of building. It's the most important monument in the city, and you can't just entrust that to anyone. Also, a project like this requires a lot of money and a lot of manpower, and those resources ebb and flow throughout the years, especially when you know Florence is getting hit by plagues that kill off huge amounts of the population. So building progress, naturally, is slow. Sometimes it's at a full standstill. Long story short is that over the next several decades, the building process continues and fits and starts. And several other architects come in to be in charge of the building process, including Giotto, perhaps best known for his fresco paintings, but also clearly a capable architect. Andrea Pisano, Francesco Talenti, and Giovanni di Lapughini. Talenti, who I will be calling Talenti, put my little Wisconsin accent on it. He introduces some pretty big changes to Arnolfo DiCambio's original design, which involved enlarging the structure considerably to the point where the church would, when built, become the largest church in Europe, at least for a while. Unlike the other architects of the cathedral, Talenti also stayed alive long enough to get some stuff done. And it's under his dominion and his design that the majority of the cathedral gets built, and apart from the dome, is eventually finished. However, there is a somewhat unfortunate side effect to Talenti's enlargement. Florence set out to build the biggest cathedral in Europe, yes, but that also required them to build the biggest dome. No one could figure out how to build a dome large enough to cover the space that needed to be covered, and what they ended up with was a really big building with a hole in its roof. And it stays that way for about a hundred years, which is when things stop being ambitious and start just looking like foolishness. Thankfully, Florence is a city that knows the power of a good old competition. It itself is competing with other cities, so why not pit artists against one another in the hopes of walking away with the glory of winning? In fact, there are several very well-known instances of Florence putting on competitions for things, specifically artistic things. But this particular competition concerned the cathedral's dome. The city invited artists to propose their plan to complete the dome. The winners of this competition were announced in 1420, 124 years after construction of Santa Maria del Fiore had begun. And yes, I did say winners, plural, because there were two. Count them one and two. Those two individuals were Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, both of whom were sculptors and goldsmiths. I can't figure out who thought it was a great idea to pick two winners, because Lord knows that things always get done better when there's two people competing for power. But also who decided that those two winners would both have very little architectural experience. Oh, what are we doing? What are we doing? And not only are there two winners, both of whom have very little architectural experience, but it's these two guys. These two got a history. Ghiberti and Brunelleschi were notorious rivals who had already competed quite fiercely two decades earlier on the design for the doors of the Baptist street just across from the cathedral. In that instance, Ghiberti won the competition, and Brunelleschi, I think, never got over it. I won't either. I still remember losing a fourth grade singing solo competition to a girl who now runs a successful peer bar business. So, I can't talk. When Brunelleschi found out that he had to share the glory of this win and the responsibility of constructing the dome with Ghiberti, his known rival, Brunelleschi was, and I think rightly so, pissed. I mean, he was angry, much angry. There were even rumors that at one point Brunelleschi feigned illness to get out of working on the project with Ghiberti. He was like, I'm sick. Brunelleschi's absence from the project caused work to come to a complete standstill. So it was decided that Brunelleschi should take over the project in its entirety. He's the only one who can get things done, put him in charge. And let's be real, that is precisely what Brunelleschi wanted. And he had just one word for Ghiberti. Goodbye. In the end, it was all for the best, because it was Brunelleschi's idea for how to build the dome that not only won out the competition, but worked. Despite everyone thinking that he was nuts, that he was cuckoo for freaking Coco Povs for proposing it. After all, Brunelleschi had no architectural experience. He was a goldsmith and a sculptor, not an architect. Again, I don't know who these people are who are making these decisions. Clearly it all worked, so what do I know? What convinced the city of Florence to put their beloved dome in the hands of a genius with a grudge? Well, according to legend, it all came down to an egg. Yes, an egg. This particular story comes down to us from Giorgio Vasari, a name that is synonymous with Italian Renaissance art history. During the 16th century, Vasari wrote a series of artists' biographies known as the Lives of the Artists. He put out one version in 1550 and then another updated version of that in 1568. Now I don't know which one this story is from because I don't happen to have this multi-volume work readily available at my parents' house in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but you'll have to forgive me. The general gist of it is this. Brunelleschi was smart and he knew it. Actually, he knew it a little too well, and that made him sassy. He was a sassy man with a whole lot of pride. According to Vizari, when Brunelleschi went to propose his plans for building the Dome of Florence to the committee that had to pick a winner, he did not bring a single drawing or plan or you know model with him. He only brought an egg. That's the first indication of how you know someone means business. They only bring a single egg with them. You know how fragile those things are? Did he like whip it out of a coat pocket? Did he have a stash of backup eggs somewhere? These are the things that I wonder about. Anyway, Brunelleschi comes to this meeting, and the committee is meeting with all these other architects and artists, and they're like, okay, assemble geniuses. Show us your plans for how to get this thing built. All the other architects are pulling out plans and models and drawings, and Brunelleschi whips out a damn egg. Now I'm editorializing here a little bit, but I would imagine that everyone starts to exchange real uncomfortable glances. Like this guy just pulled out a freaking egg. What are we to do with this? Who let this guy in? Eggman. Brunelleschi holds up this egg and declares to everyone present that the solution to building the dome was encapsulated by this egg. Because anyone who figured out how to stand the egg up straight will have figured out the solution to the dome. According to Vizari, each architect present took a turn, trying to get this egg to stand up straight on a flat surface, and each one of them failed. Which again is precisely what Brunelleschi wanted. Brunelleschi finally takes the egg and gently taps it on the table, causing the shell at the bottom to crack, leaving a relatively stable base on which the egg could stand. And he's all voila. And the other architects are like, who the heck is this douchebag with this egg? All of us could have done that. But Brunelleschi made a good point by saying, Yeah, y'all could have done it, but you didn't. I'm sure he probably would have called them all suckers or something, but he went on to draw a bunch of plans from scratch that absolutely no one present understood. But they all looked at these plans and had that familiar feeling of, well, this guy seems pretty confident in what he's doing. I must be the stupid one in this situation. I am speaking from experience when I say that this is not great reasoning. Just because someone else is confident in something does not mean that they're right or will succeed. Just because they make you feel stupid doesn't mean you are stupid. Plenty of idiots have enormous amounts of confidence. It's part of the charm that makes up for them being idiots. In Brunelleschi's case, yeah, he was this weirdo with a bunch of eggs, but he was also the real deal. He was a genius. Of course, the story in itself is probably a load of horse chip. Yes, you heard me horse ship. Not only does none of it make any sense, an egg is not a dome. You don't hand a commission to someone who pulls an egg out of his butt and is like, do you fools see this? It's amazing. Making an egg stand upright has nothing to do with building an impossible structure. Vasari, who was writing over a hundred years after Brunelleschi died, either took the stories about this event as true and then embellished them a little, or for whatever reason he just made the story up. It is certainly not his first fabrication, but the story is a good story, and it does convey Brunelleschi's general attitude. Brunelleschi had a great deal of confidence, and one does need confidence with undertaking the impossible. Confidence is nothing without an actual plan. How did Brunelleschi plan to build this thing? He started by doing something that I do, and that I recommend others do. He looked to examples of what he wanted to build, and he analyzed how those people made that shiz happen. You gather data, you analyze it, and then you figure out what works for you. It's a process that has very rarely failed me and that Brunelleschi put to good use here. At the top of Brunelleschi's list was the Roman Pantheon, which at that point was over a thousand years old and its dome looked better than ever. The Pantheon dome, however, was made from concrete, a recipe for which had been lost since the time of the Romans. Also, the Pantheon dome is a semicircle, and Brunelleschi was tasked with creating a dome on an octagonal base, meaning that it couldn't by definition be spherical. There were also several other requirements that Brunelleschi had to meet. First and foremost, Brunelleschi's design for the dome had to maintain the original spirit of Arnolfo Di Cambio's vision. This was quite the ask, especially as Arnolfo's design had been transformed over the course of some 120 years. But the guild that was in charge of the building project insisted on this fact. The dome had to stay true to Arnolfo Di Cambio's original vision. In particular, the specification was made that there would be no buttressing on the exterior of the dome. That's a great word, buttress. Buttresses are essentially half arches that extend from the exterior wall. They often give the impression of a fancy exoskeleton rib cage thing extending from the structure. They can be quite beautiful, as demonstrated in their liberal use in many Gothic cathedrals, like the one in Milan, for example, but the people running the cathedral in Florence wanted something simpler. And as you probably know, simpler rarely means easier. There was also the specification that there could be no internal support structures to brace the dome during the building process. I suppose that the people thought that this would somehow interrupt the goings-on of the church, as if, you know, the building of a dome wasn't enough of an interruption already. But hey, you do you. This all meant that Brunelleschi not only had to design the dome, but he also had to design how to build the dome without any interior or exterior supports. It had to be fully self-supporting. As if this all weren't complicated enough, the shape of the dome had already been set in stone by previous building cycles, and what Brunelleschi had to work with was an imprecise octagon. This means that the eight sides of the octagon were not all the same length, making it impossible for the lines drawn between the angles to cross at a precise center. Tricky, tricky, tricky. So let me summarize all of that. One, Brunelleschi was called to build a massive dome on an imprecise base. Two, he had to build this dome without external supports. Nothing to help it stand by pressing against it from the outside. Now, if someone presented me with this task, I would, like a relatively sane, rational person, go cry in a corner. But Brunelleschi believed in himself. He actually believed in himself a little too much. Like I don't know how anyone believes in themselves that amount. Building an imprecise dome without any centering, any external supports, it had to be fully self-supporting. I mean, this guy is cuckoo for cocoa buffs. Again, what do I know? I've never built a dome. One of the many innovations that Brunelleschi introduced during the building of his dome is the internal system that has prevented the dome from collapsing over the course of these past 500 years. Now do forgive me for stating the obvious, but domes are curved structures. That means as you build the dome from the base up, the walls curve increasingly inward. Those walls are then subjected to the press of gravity on an already super heavy structure. A successful dome displaces that stress, allowing an incredibly heavy structure to remain standing. But building that kind of structure can prove very, very difficult, especially when you're using bricks, which Brunelleschi was. But Brunelleschi's idea was ingenious. He would build a double-shelled dome. Those of you who have listened to the episode I did on the Gateway Arch in St. Louis know that Arosaranin would employ a similar concept some 500 years later. As of the early 1400s, however, this approach fell somewhere between genius and crackpot. Nothing like this had ever been attempted before, much less on the scale that Brunelleschi was proposing. Even today, we do not know exactly how Brunelleschi did what he did. We know the basics, sure. We know about the internal mechanisms, more or less, that allowed the dome to stand on its own, but we don't know exactly how Brunelleschi managed to pull this off, utilizing the technology available. This is the early to mid-15th century. This should have been impossible. But I'm gonna do my best to explain what I can. Brunelleschi's double-shelled dome system was clever, as the two shells, the inner and the outer, would better equip the dome to withstand the stress of gravity, as the inner shell reinforced the outer shell and vice versa. The fact that there is an outer shell and an inner shell also creates a gap between those two components, which allows for movement inside the walls of the dome. This makes repairs and maintenance a heck of a lot easier, and today when people climb to the top of the dome, that's the space that they travel through, the gap between the two shells. The creation of this two-shelled dome involved a series of wooden ribs paired with chain, stone, and wood rings. This made it possible for the dome to be self-supporting. So earlier I mentioned buttresses, still a great word, buttresses, which were popular architectural elements in the centuries before the Florence Dome, because they provided exterior support, pushing against a dome or a wall to prevent the structure from buckling outward under the stresses of gravity and weight. Brunelleschi's dome accomplishes that objective without any kind of external support. It's all built into the structure itself. The internal structure of Brunelleschi's dome is frequently equated to that of a wooden barrel, a wine barrel, if you will, or maybe a whiskey if that is your preferred alcohol. Barrels employ strips of wood and metal hoops that bind those strips of wood together to prevent them from splitting outward. As you fill a barrel with your preferred beverage, the wood will naturally react to the new forces at play, but the hoops hug the wood and keep it from bursting. Brunelleschi employed a similar concept for the dome, utilizing this system of hoops and ribs to ensure the dome didn't collapse under its own weight and didn't buckle under the stresses of gravity. There are vertical wooden ribs that form the skeletal structure of the dome, which are then bound horizontally by a series of hoops. As gravity pushes down on the dome, the vertical ribs want to expand outward as they absorb that stress, but the hoops prevent that from happening. Think of a corset. As your ribs were to expand outward, the corset keeps your waist tiny by not letting them do that. There's a similar idea at play here. As the wooden ribs try to expand, the hoops keep them in place. And that's the skeletal structure of the dome in a nutshell. Ribs and rings. The result was an octagonal dome featuring, you guessed it, eight vaults that came together at the top to create what is still, to this day, the largest brick dome in the whole world. This system was especially critical considering that Brunelleschi's dome is a masonry dome. Its skeleton is beams and hoops, but its flesh, if we're keeping with this metaphor, is made of brick. To state the obvious, bricks are heavy, especially when you are stacking millions of them. Literally millions. Typically, when one builds a dome, one uses something called centering to support the structure during the building process. This is what I was referring to earlier when I said that Brunelleschi could not use any internal support while building his project. It holds the dome up until the dome can support itself. But as per his contract, Brunelleschi could not use centering, as that would disrupt the cathedral's ability to function, which again is hilarious. It's like my Renaissance dudes. You've been operating with a massive hole in your roof for a hundred years, and people are coming to fix it, but you don't want to be disrupted? Yeah, okay, 600-year-old boomer. But don't worry, Brunelleschi has got you covered. Brunelleschi devised a plan for how he would stack the bricks of the dome in order to eliminate the need for internal support during the process. He devised to implement a herringbone pattern that would prevent bricks from shifting out of place once they had been stacked and joined together with mortar. You can still see passages of this herringbone pattern when you climb the dome, which is super cool. The herringbone pattern was created by introducing vertical bricks that held horizontal bricks in place. This is incredibly difficult to explain without visuals, but I shall do my best. If you were to ask the average person how to build a dome from brick, they, you know, after being like, why the hell are you asking me to do this? They would probably do rows and rows of brick and mortar, the substance that binds bricks together. As the dome would start to curve inward, however, you would start to encounter some pretty serious problems. That's because you are working with two materials of varying strength. The mortar is weaker than the brick, and it would not only be likely but inevitable that at some point there would be a crack in the mortar. The bricks would then start to shift and everything would probably collapse. Brunelleschi's dome, in comparison, is like the ultimate Tetris. He utilized a single unit, the brick. Millions and millions of relatively uniform brick. Now let's say you're a worker on the dome and you are starting the project. You start by putting a vertical brick in place that is partially anchored in the wall, therefore part of it sticks out. The bit of it that sticks out aligns exactly with the first horizontal brick that you lay next to it. After, let's say, four horizontal bricks, you then place another vertical brick. This time, though, you don't anchor it in the wall. Instead, you place it so that it extends upwards. So you've now got a line of horizontal bricks bookended by two vertical bricks, one that extends down and the other that extends up. And obviously you're mortaring all of these together. You then lay another brick. This one you fit inside the angle created by the final vertical brick that you laid. Then you lay a horizontal brick beside that one on top of the previous line of horizontal bricks that you had laid. Then you lay a horizontal brick beside that one, which will sit on top of that previous row of horizontal bricks that you've already laid. Then you lay three more. Then you lay a new vertical brick, and you and a bunch of your worker friends continue doing that for years and years and years and years and years. The finished dome is rows of horizontal bricks punctuated by vertical bricks that form a sort of zipper-like arrangement that winds up the dome. In Italian, they call this pattern spina pesce, spine of the fish. The genius behind this pattern is that it doesn't allow the horizontal rows of bricks to shift, because they are bookended and reinforced by those of vertical bricks. Those vertical bricks are in turn held in place by the horizontal bricks. Of course, all of the bricks are bound together by mortar, a paste used to bind stone, bricks, etc. The thing is, the mortar that bound each row of new bricks needed to dry for a week before workers could start the next row. This means that building the Florentine dome was a very, very, very slow process. At a rate of about one new row of bricks each week, the dome only grew by about a foot each month. In case you need me to do that math for you, that's 12 feet a year. But hot damn, they did it. And they continued to do it, and they eventually finished it. But this begs a new question. How exactly did Brunelleschi manage to get all of these crazy heavy building materials up to the workers working on the dome? This caliber of dome had never been built before, as I keep saying, it's absolutely new. So naturally, the technology to carry out the building process didn't exist. So what did Brunelleschi do? How did he grapple with this issue that the technology he needed hadn't been invented yet? Easy. He invented it. That's right. He invented not only the dome, not only the process of building the dome, but all of the necessary components to build it. Machines to hoist thousands of tons of material hundreds of feet in the air. He was truly the mastermind of this project. Maybe more than anything else in this entire building process, this was Brunelleschi's biggest achievement. Not the design of the dome, but the ability to carry it out, the ability to actually see it through to the end, to build the impossible. While audacious, the act of hoisting materials is a bit more easy to explain than the rest of it. Brunelleschi invented an ox-driven hoist that would allow materials to go up and down a center platform, or more correctly, through a hole in that central platform. Like an ox-driven dumbwaiter thing that brings food up and down and up and down, except this was building materials. I mean, can you imagine the mess? But perhaps the most mysterious aspect of Brunelleschi building the dome is what kind of system he had in place to ensure the precise placement of each one of the four million bricks used. Four million. That's too many damn bricks. There have, of course, been theories about ropes and strings that give me, someone already prone to anxiety, straight up nausea. You know what else gives me nause? The idea of being a worker, laying bricks at 200, maybe 300 feet in the air, with absolutely nothing but some wood scaffolding between you and death. No thank you, no thank you at all, no thank you all day long. Even more daunting is the process of getting up to that scaffolding each day for work. In fact, it's alleged that Brunelleschi required his workers to remain on the scaffolding all day long. He had food and wine, weakened with water for obvious reasons, hoisted up to them. Now I don't know what they did for the bathroom, that's not generally specified, but I can imagine that it was great. Pooping at 300 feet in the air. My goodness. There are some very good theories about how Brunelleschi pulled this particular brick cat out of the dome bag. Delightfully, one of the only documents that we have regarding Brunelleschi's methods is someone talking mad trash. Oh yeah. As Brunelleschi was building the dome, there was this guy named Giovanni di Gerardo da Prato. Giovanni da Prato. We'll call him Johnny. Our boy Johnny was one of the many people who thought that Brunelleschi was Bat Shiz crazy, and that his plan for the dome was also, you guessed it, Bat Shiz crazy. We know this because Johnny wrote his diatribe down, and although he was dead wrong about Brunelleschi being crazy and incompetent, Johnny was quite specific in airing his grievances, which has given scholars an idea of Brunelleschi's plan, specifically how he managed to control and regulate the placement of bricks. This was incredibly important because this is an eight-sided dome. You have to ensure that the bricks line up in each one of the eight segments so that they meet at the top. The leading theory involves Brunelleschi having some kind of platform near the base of the dome that didn't move. The work scaffolds would move closer and closer to the top as needed, but this base platform stayed put. According to one theory by Massimo Ricci, this platform had an octagonal opening proportional to the dome. Around this opening, Brunelleschi drew a flower. This flower was essentially an octagon, but instead of each side being comprised of a straight line, it was a semicircle. It creates a sort of abstract blobby flower thing. The workers then utilized this flower pattern to help them run rope lines that guided the workers as they laid the bricks. It's all very complicated. But the moral of the story is that the flower pattern on the main platform, those curved quote unquote pedals, mimicked the exact curvature of each of the eight sides of the dome. The workers utilized ropes attached to that permanent scaffold to guide their work, ensuring that the eight vaults would eventually meet at the top, which in turn ensured that the structure would be stable. Whether or not this was really how the workers proceeded, if this was how Brunelleschi pulled off this feat, we don't really know. But we do know this. Whatever he did do, it worked. From start to finish, the building of the dome took 16 years, finishing sometime around 1435. After its completion, the people in charge of the project decided to have yet another competition. What artist could design the best lantern for the dome? The lantern being the architectural equivalent to a cake topper, the cake being, you know, the dome. Now these people had some pale on them. You can look that up. P-A-L-L-E. They got Pale. Because they just watched Brunelleschi build this miraculous dome for 16 years, and they had the audacity to turn to Brunelleschi and be like, hey, thanks for building the dome. Did us a solid. Now we're going to turn around and try to decide who gets the honor of putting the cake topper on it. That must have been a slap in the face. Or at least that's how I imagine it. He just spent 16 years of his life building something impossible, and you just want someone else to build this main accessory? I do not think so, sir. Even worse, guess who Brunelleschi was competing against once again? That's right. Lorenzo Ghiberti, the former but very short-lived co-builder of the dome, and the one who had beat out Brunelleschi for the competition for the baptistry doors. Can you imagine if they actually selected Ghiberti's design for the lantern? Whew! That would have been some glorious drama. I half suspect Brunelleschi would have been like, oh yeah? And lit that freaking dome on fire. Thankfully, though, for all parties involved, Brunelleschi won this competition too, and he earned the commission for the lantern, as well as the four Excedre, or semicircular domes that sort of decorate and reinforce the dome's drum. The marble lantern that Brunelleschi designed now serves as the viewing deck for those of us with the thigh power to make it to the top. It looks teeny tiny in pictures, but it actually holds several dozen people at one time. Unfortunately, although Brunelleschi did design the lantern, he never saw it installed on the top of his impossible dome. Filippo Brunelleschi died on April 15, 1446, at the age of 69. His legacy continues to endure, emblazoned in the pages of Florentine history and immortalized in some of the city's most treasured buildings. Brunelleschi is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Renaissance. He was a brilliant mind that remained undaunted even in the face of the most impossible of challenges. His service to the city of Florence and the entirety of the Italian Renaissance were honored upon his death. He is interred in the crypt of the cathedral, destined to sleep forever below the structure to which he dedicated decades of his life. His tomb bears an inscription. Therefore, in tribute to his exceptional talents, a grateful country that will always remember him buries him here in the soil below. Today visitors to Florence have the opportunity to climb Brunelleschi's Impossible Dome. An experience that includes 463 stairs and zero, count them zero elevators. I climbed the dome when I was in Florence just a few weeks ago, and I think that my legs still haven't fully recovered. The experience not only allows you to see the passages of exposed brickwork, including that characteristic herringbone pattern, but, and this is my favorite part, it allows you to walk around the interior of the dome, right, up close and personal to the fresco painted on its inside. Giorgio Vasari's Last Judgment, painted in the 1570s. I could not believe how huge those figures were. They are absolutely gigantic. Definitely many times larger than life's size. That viewpoint also allows you to see delightfully the cracks that have appeared in the dome over the years, all of which, of course, have been secured and reinforced. What I would not recommend doing was what I did, which was that I decided to climb the dome just hours after a fairly powerful earthquake hit Florence. Now I know that they would not have opened the dome if it wasn't safe, but I only thought about how stupid I was being about halfway up. And at that point, you just gotta do what those brickworkers did for 16 years. Just keep going. That is all I have for you today on Brunelleschi's Dome, the structure that many say marked the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. As always, you can find a list of my source materials as well as visual media posted on the podcast's website. Stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. In order to write this episode, I pulled mostly from my memory, the didactic materials at the Duomo Museum in Florence, the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, and a series of articles, including Justina Scalia's article entitled Building the Cathedral in Florence, another essay entitled Building Brunelleschi's Dome, a practical methodology by Barry Jones, Andrea Sereni, and Massimo Ricci, and a series of other articles from both academic journals and more familiar publications like National Geographic. I also watched a few videos on YouTube that I found to be as entertaining as they were informative. There you can find a nice TED Talk by David Battistella that's basically a lecture on how Brunelleschi had the pale to build the dome. Also on YouTube is a delightful four-minute-ish illustrated production by National Geographic that explains and illustrates how Brunelleschi built the dome. I watched that clip about 15 times, and I'm in good company, because the short clip has been viewed by over 1.5 million people. There's also a documentary that appeared on Nova slash National Geographic called The Cathedral Mystery. I watched it, I found it entertaining, but I found it particularly helpful for visualizing the herringbone pattern and the theory about the flower and the ropes. Again, I will post all of those links and more reading on the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. Before I go into my usual endspiels in Gus Corner for this episode, I did want to extend a thank you and do a little plug for a book series that I was recently made aware of. A few months ago, I received an email from Carrie Coello, who narrates uh audiobooks by Sarah Wissaman, called the Flora Garibaldi Art History Mystery Series. Carrie was kind enough to send me a copy of the first book in this series entitled Burt Sienna. I listened to the book on and off during my travels, and I especially enjoyed Wissaman's descriptions of Sienna. And the books definitely have a cozy mystery type of feel to them. If you think that that's something that would interest you, the books are readily available on Amazon, as well as through Audible, which is where I listened to the first book. I would also absolutely recommend looking at your local library to see if you can pick up a copy there. For the record, I am not being paid to say any of this, though hey, Audible, let's talk. I love you. But I did want to thank Carrie for taking the time to reach out and send me a copy. That's the Flora Garibaldi art history mystery series by Sarah Wissaman, narrated in audiobook form by Carrie Coello. As for Gus Corner, this episode, Gus is doing awesome. He received several toys for Christmas, all of which squeak and it's driving me nuts. Also, the other day I thought he was covered in speckles of blood, but it turns out that he just got a little too overzealous licking out the strawberry jam container. Gus gonna gus. Speaking of the Gus Man, follow the podcast's Instagram page for more on Gus the Dog. The Facebook page too, but I'm way more active on Instagram. I also posted a few bits and bobs for my travels to Italy here and there, and I will continue to do stuff like that whenever the opportunity presents itself. I'm currently in Green Bay. There aren't many opportunities here, so you'll just get more Gus. I also post all of my Gus edits for when he invades art on those two pages. That's Instagram and Facebook. I also have a Twitter. I never post there, but hey, if you're looking for something to do, please go follow all of those pages. Also, if you would take two minutes, two minutes, that's all I ask, two minutes, to review the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, you know, wherever you listen to it, that would be incredible. I would really, really appreciate it, and I appreciate anyone who has done that since the past episode. I see them, I read them, and it makes my day. So thank you for that. Also, if you ever want to get into contact with me, maybe recommend some topics for future episodes that you'd like to hear, you can do that through the contact me tab on the website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com, or directly through email at stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com. I usually respond in a few days, and I absolutely love hearing from you. The usual thanks go out to hook sounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for the royalty free music featured in the podcast. The first song that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod, and the jauntier tune is a little boogie called Success Dreams. That is all for me today. My voice is shot. Thank you for listening to Cold Ridden Me. And also thank you for being so patient for me to return to the microphone. One of my goals for the new year is to get on a true four-week schedule, but I'm super busy with school, so we'll see how that goes. But for now, thank you, thank you, thank you again for listening. I really appreciate it, and I hope that you all have a fantastic New Year's. But don't forget, don't forget to take the time to look at something beautiful today. I know that that's like a shtick that I do, but seriously, I really hope that you take the time to look at something cool today. Whether it's your dog, a candle, I don't know, the snow, something. It makes every day just a little bit better to take the time to do something like that. Alright, over and out, y'all. Hoopa that 300 feet in the air. My goodness.