Buildings and Structures
Florence Cathedral
Also Known As Santa Maria del Fiore, the Duomo
Cathedral
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The cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, crowned by the octagonal brick dome Filippo Brunelleschi raised between 1420 and 1436 without conventional timber centering, still the largest masonry dome in the world. The dome's construction, managed with machines Brunelleschi invented for the purpose, is the founding feat of Renaissance architecture.
Facts
Building Type Completed YearThe year the dome was completed and the cathedral consecrated; the lantern above it was finished later in the century. Cross-Tradition Connections
Designed By
The dome; the cathedral body was designed by Arnolfo di Cambio and continued by others from 1296.
In Style
The body of the cathedral, begun 1296, is Italian Gothic; the dome that crowns it opened the Renaissance.
Brunelleschi's dome of 1420 to 1436 is the founding work of Renaissance architecture.
Uses Element
The largest masonry dome in the world.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
How exactly did Brunelleschi build the dome of Florence Cathedral without conventional centering?
Brunelleschi left no treatise and guarded his methods in his own lifetime, so the surviving evidence is the dome itself, the account books, and machines described secondhand. How the herringbone brickwork and the double shell actually stabilized each fresh course of the rising vault, and how the courses were laid out in space without centering to guide them, is still argued among historians of construction, with competing geometric reconstructions defended in the literature and none established.
What would resolve this A reconstruction of the laying-out method that accounts for the dome as measured, the documented equipment and the account-book record together, tested at scale rather than argued from drawings alone.
Construction History, Structural Engineering, Archival ResearchEncyclopedia Britannica
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