Filippo Brunelleschi

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) was a Florentine architect and engineer who trained as a goldsmith and became a master in 1398. In 1401 he lost the competition for the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery to Lorenzo Ghiberti. He later won the 1418 competition for the dome of Florence Cathedral, which was built between 1420 and 1436.

The dome covers an octagon nearly 42 meters across. Brunelleschi built it as two shells, inner and outer, using more than four million bricks, partly laid in a herringbone pattern in which upright bricks set into the horizontal courses hold them in place while the mortar sets. It was raised without external buttresses and without the full timber framework normally used to support a vault during building. He designed new hoisting machines to lift the materials. It is still the largest masonry dome in the world. The lantern, the small open tower on top, was completed by his friend Michelozzo in 1461.

His other Florentine buildings use classical columns, round arches and proportions based on simple ratios: the Ospedale degli Innocenti, a hospital for abandoned children begun in 1419; the basilica of San Lorenzo (from 1421); the Pazzi Chapel (from about 1430); and Santo Spirito (from 1434). Between about 1415 and 1420 he demonstrated with painted panels how to draw buildings in linear perspective, with parallel lines meeting at a single vanishing point.