I enjoyed this book immensely, but King delivered on neither clause. I found myself puzzling over his technical explanations, rummaging through my library for a superior cutaway of the dome to better visualize his wordy exegesis. Oddly, each of the three well-known books I turned to - Murray's Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, Kostof's History of Architecture, and Hartt's History of Italian Renaissance Art - had precisely the same superb cutaway of the dome within a dome, showing Brunelleschi's Gothic vaulting underneath the classically inspired outer dome. "Mirabile dictu, so that's it!" This is only one of many instances where King created confusion where he might have parted the technical mists, with clearer text or with a better mating of text to illustration.

A corollary to this concern: for a book that has a fair number of illustrations, I found these, for the most part, woefully chosen. I appreciated the reproductions of period etchings and drawings, but these should have been supplemented with additional helps for the text. And at the very close, as a veritable punchline to the short book, King provides one small photograph of the dome in middle distance - no angles, no details, no close-up of the lantern, no full-page, no color. For readers who have neither been to Florence and seen the magnificent Santa Maria del Fiore in its urban context nor seen many illustrations or aspects of the dome, these are galling omissions.

As for the second term of the contract, King simply walks away from the subtitle's claim. Brunelleschi did indeed reinvent architecture, but not with the magnificent engineering feat of spanning the transept of Santa Maria del Fiore. On page 45, King discusses several commissions Brunelleschi won during the period in which he worked on the dome. Two of these, the Oespedale degli Innocenti and the Basilica of Santo Spiritu, literally did reinvent architecture. By investing these structures with rounded arches, classical columns, domal vaults, and classically derived ornamentation and proportions, Brunelleschi recovered for the Renaissance - before others could beat him to it - the architectural accomplishments of classical Rome. In an interesting chapter on Brunelleschi and Donatello's Roman adventure, King provides necessary background for understanding the Florentine achievement.

What happened? Here's my theory: King, a fledgling historian but seasoned novelist, might have submitted a longer draft to his publisher, who may have responded, "you've got two stories here. One is really interesting, has a strong narrative line, tension, characters, villains, obstacles - a brilliant story. Tell the tale of il duomo! And lose that BOOORRRRing stuff about the Foundling Hospital and the other churches." And maybe, just maybe, the dutiful novelist cut his manuscript to the lively story before us. That said, the publisher liked the title, or perhaps even composed it to amplify the puzzling phrase "Brunelleschi's Dome" to novitiates, promising the biggest of the big pictures on the cheap - in well under two hunded profusely illustrated pages.

A strong indictment. But I did indeed like this book a great deal and recommend it without difficulty - with the above qualifications. As I was reading it - actually, I went back and forth between the book itself and the Books on Tape edition, narrated much much too quickly by Richard Matthews, a chipper Brit - it struck me as exemplary "popular history": absolutely compelling as a story, vividly bringing to life Brunelleschi, aspects of his times, his rivals (particularly Lorenzo Ghiberti and his allies), throwing in everything but the kitchen sink - a little bit on war, military engineering, goldsmiths, political skullduggery (actually, King is weak here but provides useful dabs of color: Florence was a boiling pot) - with occasional patches of humor. In the end, this is a sequence of delightfully strung-together anecdotes woven though a book more about engineering - statics, stresses, and lifting machines -than about architecture and design. Filippo may have reinvented site management and construction techniques as well, but that's not the claim of the title, and it's not nearly as sexy as the universal "reinvention of an art form." If you're really interested in the topic, you'll have to look elsewhere to resolve the questions that still go begging once you've finished this brisk, enjoyable romp through 15th Century Florence.

11 of 11 found the following review helpful:


Visionary  Dec 15, 2001 By taking a rest
Not many can lay claim to creating a result that is not only a first, proves that which was thought to be impossible was not, and to have their accomplishment remain as awe inspiring today as it was centuries ago. I read the soft cover version of this book so I don't know whether the hardcover offers the same photograph. The inside of the back cover shows the dome as it looks today, even after I had read the book and all the dimensions of the dome it described, the photograph still took me by surprise. The sheer scale of what was built is as breathtaking, as it is beautiful and audacious.

The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in many ways remains unmatched in the engineering feats that were accomplished with its construction. Modern technology and materials have created domes for sports parks that dwarf the span of the dome in this book, but none match it in beauty and none will stand for the almost 600 years this dome has stood.

This is a fascinating story that does not require that the reader be an engineer. There are illustrations that show some of the methods used, and while the book would benefit from having many more, the layperson can grasp the immensity of the undertaking. Vastly oversimplifying what Brunelleschi accomplished was the construction of the largest span of open space with no interior support while it was being built, and a building that did not require the giant flying buttress appendages of cathedrals like Notre Dame in Paris. A dome traditionally was prevented from destroying the building it rose upon by the use of massive exterior supports. A dome by its nature pushes down and outward, no one have ever conceived a dome of this magnitude that could be constructed, much less be completed and remain standing for centuries.

In addition, since none of the traditional scaffolding was in place Brunelleschi had to invent methods for raising countless tons of stone to the dome's starting point 170 feet above the ground, or approximately the equivalent of a 17 story building today. When the dome was completed a lantern that would require the raising of one million pounds of stone was to be raised over the opening, or oculus at the dome's highest point. The story of the dome is worth the book, however the author includes the history that took place while it was built, the politics, the wars, and the rivalries. A read most anyone would enjoy.

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