Brunelleschi's Dome

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King, 167 pages

At the end of the 13th century, the Florentines decided that they required a new cathedral, as much to celebrate the city's growing prosperity as to replace the crumbling Santa Reparata.  An ambitious plan was approved, but progress was slow, and it was not until the beginning of the 15th century that preparations began for the construction of what would be the largest masonry dome ever constructed.  Filippo Brunelleschi's innovative proposal for the dome construction was ultimately selected over several more conventional plans, including one by Lorenzo Ghiberti.  The dome was completed sixteen years later and remains an iconic symbol of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

The story of this construction, through two decades of war, plague, and civil strife, is the subject of Ross King's book.  It is a promising subject indeed - a great construction project during one of the most colorful and fertile periods in human history, a contest of human ingenuity and the feuding wills of great artists and their patrons.  Unfortunately, King's book is deadly dull.  Working with incomplete historical and biographical records, he constructs his own account of events, asserting that a figure "must have" done this, or "seems to have" done that.  He plays equally fast and loose with history (at one point he flatly declares that the technique of perspective was "lost", then shortly thereafter says it was abandoned as "dishonest") and even basic facts (he asserts that other than Brunelleschi, the "only other person interred inside the cathedral was St Zenobius", which seems to be simply untrue).  Worse than all this, he seems to regard only the technical challenges of construction to be worth writing about, resulting in a book that contains nothing of beauty, nothing of poetry, and precious little of mind or spirit.