BRUNELLESCHI, FILIPPO. - Architect and sculptor, b. in Florence in 1377 to Brunellesco di Lippo di Tura and Giovanna di Giovanni degli Spini, d. there on 15 April 1446. He grew to such fame both among his contemporaries and among posterity as to become almost the personification, in the broad sense, of the first Italian humanistic rebirth.
From the "Vita" that is ordinarily attributed to Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, with which other independent sources moreover agree, we learn that B., skilled in drawing, began his artistic life as a goldsmith; that is, as a craftsman, according to the old medieval and Florentine tradition. In fact, on 2 July 1404 he was registered in the silk guild, which included that of the goldsmiths; around 1400 he executed for the silver dossal of the church of S. Iacopo in Pistoia two half-figures of prophets. He carried on the activity of sculptor especially in his youth: and although many of his works have been destroyed (for example, the much-praised wooden statue representing the Magdalene, carved for the old S. Spirito, [lost] to a fire), the testimony of quite well-known works remains, among which the most important are the crucifix of S. Maria Novella (carved in competition with that of Donatello for S. Croce) and the panel with the sacrifice of Abraham presented at the 1402 competition for the second door of the baptistery, in which Ghiberti was preferred to him; but in his panel one already discerns the quality of his style, wholly directed toward plasticity and naturalistic and human expression even under the discipline of a rigidly geometric composition; this was a declared reaction to ornamental calligraphism and to the decorative elegances that, instead, still constituted the Gothicizing orientation of Florentine taste, which substantially informed Ghiberti's art.
The literary and historical culture of the humanists contributed to his formation, with special regard to what related most directly to art: some hold that the treatise of Vitruvius was widely known to him; certainly, even if his journeys to Rome of which the biographers speak are not rigorously proven (the first would be very important, at the beginning of the century, in the guise of sculptor, in the company of Donatello), the knowledge of ancient monuments deeply influenced his formation, both as regards architectural form and as regards construction technique; yet an unspecified innovation of his in the manner of walling, which he applied in some halls of the Palazzo dei Priori, is earlier than the Quattrocento, and therefore a genuine fruit of his genius as an innovator.
But essential to the determining of his personality was, according to the sources, mathematical culture, which he always favored, as he demonstrated by cultivating the friendship of the most distinguished devotees of this science, among them, later, Paolo Dal Pozzo Toscanelli, with whom he was on intimate terms (from mathematical theory he drew the motive for practical applications also in the field of mechanics: and we find him in fact not only a fertile inventor and builder of "clocks and alarm devices," but also expert as no one in his times in all the tools and means necessary for building, of which he made ample and happy application in the colossal work of the dome of S. Maria del Fiore). This mathematical culture allowed him not to invent but to make practically realizable, above all for the benefit of artists, perspective (which was monocular and central, and not strictly faithful to the Euclidean and continuous conception of space); for the application of this science he found a practical rule that he transmitted by direct teaching to Masaccio and to Donatello, drawing from it very great fame. This is also proven by the biographers' interest in the two paintings (soon lost) that B. painted, with the value of pure perspectival exercise, portraying the baptistery and the piazza della Signoria.
The new perspectival rule divulged, in substance, the possibility of representing with certain method space in its reality, considered as objective, by means of the rational application of geometric laws and positive optical data. To the mystical infinity of medieval figurations, geometric perspective substituted the rational coordination of spatial entities at a geometric point (the so-called vanishing point) in which the representation was fixed, almost the materialization, even in the mathematical abstractness, of infinity; infinity, that is, was so to speak subject to the recognition of reason and for that very reason was represented, with the believed objectivity of mathematics, as the supreme fruit of man's speculative capacities (see, for this symbolic representation of perspective and in general of mathematics, the De docta ignorantia, of Nicholas of Cusa).
In this way B. personified from the outset both the polemical aspect of humanistic taste with respect to the Middle Ages and the positive character of the new art. So much so that it is not surprising that the Florentines turned to him for the work that most impassioned them, that is, for the construction of the dome of S. Maria del Fiore.
Already summoned from 1404 to give advice for the gigantic building, which, through complex vicissitudes, had proceeded slowly since Arnolfo di Cambio had begun it in 1296, B. drafted (1417) a project for vaulting the dome without the use of armatures.
This "invention," which appeared superhuman and appears even today most ingenious, persuaded the operai of the building, who ordered the architect to make a wooden model that should be as clear and definitive as possible. However, not only as a prudential measure but also so as not to depart from the Florentine custom of freely involving artists and people in the most important works and deliberations, the Opera del Duomo announced a competition (19 Aug. 1418) for a model that proposed not the form to be given to the dome (no one, up to this time, had thought of departing from the pointed fourth proposed by Arnolfo in imitation of that of the dome of the baptistery) but the means for concretely realizing the immense vault. In competition with B., Ghiberti presented a model - with armatures. The outcome of the competition was favorable to B., who perfected his model with the help of Donatello and Nanni di Banco; but, with equal salary, Ghiberti was imposed on him (in addition to the mathematician Battista d'Antonio), who, with B., shared the qualification of provveditore. The works began on 7 Aug. 1420. In the meantime B. had practically demonstrated the possibility of adopting his system of vaulting a dome without armature by executing in S. Iacopo sopr'Arno the chapel of Schiatta Ridolfi (now destroyed).
On the preceding 13 July the three provveditori had fixed the norms for carrying out the work in a detailed report, in which there appears for the first time the resolution to adopt for the dome a curvature different from Arnolfo's, namely the "quinto acuto" pitch (this because of the technical procedure of "not making a centering"), at least for the lowest part of the vault, leaving in suspense every decision on the form to be given to the dome as a whole. Only five years later was it resolved that the curvature begun should be kept constant for the terminal part as well; and on that occasion Ghiberti was subordinated to B. So that, although recent studies have sought to limit B.'s work rigidly to the technique of construction, assigning him the office of "engineer," in order to leave to Ghiberti the artistic merit of the architecture, it must be held, while fairly weighing the anecdotal disputes between B. and Ghiberti during the works, that the paternity of the great work belongs essentially and in every sense to Filippo. Vaulted without centering, by means of a brick framework proceeding in a spiral and a system of transverse arches set on ribs, the dome was considered completed when the terminal ring (the "chierica") had been finished; the event (Aug. '36) was solemnly celebrated with a sacred function, amid the rejoicing of the people who had flocked into the Cathedral. At B.'s death the lantern was still missing, for which, however, he himself had prepared the model, still preserved in the museum of the Opera; its execution was overseen, without rigorous fidelity, by Giuliano da Maiano. Even today, strictly speaking, the dome must be considered unfinished, since the loggia that runs externally at the springing (caustically described by Michelangelo as a "cage for crickets") is built on only one of the eight sides. It is judged by some critics as a work still bearing witness to Gothic taste, both for the framework of the ribs, springing and elastic, and for certain constructive and formal peculiarities; but, to increase and enhance its spatial and plastic essence (prepared, moreover, however obscurely, by the first architect of the Duomo, Arnolfo di Cambio), the Florentines wished to clad it in such a way that it should be "magnificent and swelling," that is, of a more majestic appearance and as far as possible from the pointed pitch (it is in fact a double dome, but its outer shell participates, if at all, only passively in the structural economy; and therefore it cannot substantially be taken as a forerunner of the double domes of the 16th century).
During the long works for the Duomo (B., besides the dome, made there the external "tribunette," classically articulated by niches and engaged columns) B. attended to other works. The testimonies of his works of military and civil architecture are scanty, the latter consisting, moreover, of remodellings and partial constructions: the documents link his name to the fortifications of Pisa (1426 and '40), of Vicopisano (1435 and 1439), Castelfranco, Volterra, Lastra, etc., and to the Busini, Pazzi, Quaratesi and Barbadori palaces. The Palazzo di Parte Guelfa is unfinished and tampered with (the main hall seems entirely authentic); the attribution of the Palazzo Pitti is doubtful, which, in any case, was originally much smaller than the present one (it extended to the 7 central windows).
In religious buildings, on the other hand, B.'s personality is fully asserted, already moreover well defined in the youthful work (c. 1419) of the loggia of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, notwithstanding the alterations damagingly made to the original project by clumsy executors, among whom, above all, Fr. della Luna.
The Old Sacristy of S. Lorenzo (begun in 1420) is already a frank affirmation of space interpreted geometrically, not so much for its cubic form as for the manner in which the its internal walls. Against the light background, the pietra serena draws with strong chromatic emphasis the classicizing pilasters and entablature and rigorously defines or delimits the windows, the skeleton of the dome (the "crests" and the arcatures) and the ornamental roundels. But all these elements resolutely deny any structural function or memory: the pilasters, and even less the brackets, do not justify their original function of support, spaced as they are, from the entablature; nor do the arcades and the members of the dome, by their thinness, appear as visual enhancements of a static system of weights and forces; rather the dark elements have the value of pure lines, which alone suffice to define three-dimensional space; so much so that the wall loses every concrete function. And even better such formal values are realized in the perfect Pazzi Chapel (begun around 1430; the facade is unfinished), since there the elements (windows, arcatures, roundels) are always well separated from one another, without any weight and without any static dependence, almost poised in the void, or rather in the pure accidentalness of the walls; so much so that between false and true windows there is no disparity of form whatsoever. And the facade, which with its central arcade perpetuates Roman-Hellenistic and Cosmatesque schemes and anticipates Bramantesque schemes, places no external limits on the series of architectural values. The ground plan of the monument hints at an aspiration to centrality in which, only later, the humanistic ideal of perfect form would be exhausted.
Earlier than the Pazzi Chapel is S. Lorenzo, of which only the interior can be called complete, even if not faithfully interpreted in the parts that are due, as it seems, to Manetti; there the ideals of spatial geometry manifest themselves quite clearly. Not only is the central axis well marked in the pavement and in the median member of the ceiling (according to the original reconstruction), but the uninterrupted entablature, tangent to the arches beneath, certifies the perspectival, and therefore linear-geometric, value of the architecture. And the absence of any sense of weight is fully certified by the presence of the pulvini which interrupt any functional link between the clear columns and the walls above them.
In the church of S. Spirito, almost all of which was built after the B.'s death, but without misrepresenting his intentions, the master's style reaches fulfillment; and there shines through it, despite the disfigurements that have been perpetrated there, the baldachin and numerous Baroque superstructures. The values are, in general, those of S. Lorenzo; but extremely clarified: the entablature frees itself entirely from any, even problematic, support and sincerely manifests itself as a bundle of lines running toward the back; the formal function of the pulvini, of the central band of the floor and of the ceiling (De Angelis reconstruction) is accentuated: and, almost as a definitive clarification of the master's style, what in the drawing was the vanishing point toward which all those lines converged is concretized, in the architectural work, in the central column, which, at the back, thus appears almost as the supreme goal of every formal element.
And the formal inconsistency of the walls here becomes indisputable: the perimeter of the church is entirely hollowed out by a series of successive chapels; between one and the other is an engaged column, strongly projecting, so that the side aisles seen axially (that is, in perspective) do not reveal the limiting presence of the outer wall.
Thus, reduced to pure geometry of lines, Brunelleschian spatiality is concretized in mathematical essentiality.
The humanistic ideal is therefore fully affirmed by the B.; who nevertheless recognizes how the necessary duality of the point of view and the vanishing point limit, in a certain way, the spatial absolute, which, on the other hand, is represented only in the expressive fullness (almost symbolic) of the circle, that is, of the central form. But both in the Pazzi Chapel, and even more in the hexadecagonal oratory of the Angeli (unfortunately barely begun) the B.'s art reaches toward the future and confronts with a fully Renaissance spirit the supreme problem of centrality.
Even if, as the biographers and critics maintain, the B. drew on the local tradition (one notices in the ancient church of the SS. Apostoli, generous with lessons even for later architects, forms quite akin to those of the B.) or on the evocative Roman antiquity, it is certain that both critical propositions, though both justifiable in the taste of those who propounded them, yield before the supreme originality of the B. Just as the wish to recognize in the linearism and in the predominance of void over solid of Brunelleschian architecture a historicist continuity with Gothic forms remains an empty critical schema before the personality of the Master. Which spreads, in free descent, throughout the whole century and beyond Tuscany, in parallel with the cultural current that has its head in Leon Battista Alberti (v.) to generate, through the synthesis of the Sangallo (especially Antonio the Younger), the definitive art of the early 16th century; and provides passionate subject of study for Leonardo, who will draw the plan of S. Spirito, and is destined to arouse surprising admiration in the Baroque Bernini, who in the same S. Spirito would have to recognize « the most beautiful church in the world ». - See Pl. XII.
Bibliography2 works
Biography and criticism: in addition to the already cited fundamental work of Fabriczy see: W. Limburger, s. v. in Thieme-Becker, V, pp. 125-32 (with the preceding bibliography); H. Folnesics, B.-Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Früherenwissenschaftler, Vienna 1915; L. H. Heydenreich, Spätverke Brunelleschis, in Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 52 (1930), pp. 1-28; F. Pellati, Vitruvio e il B., in La Rinascita, 2 (1939), pp. 343-65; P. Sampaolesi, La cupola di S. Maria del Fiore - Il progetto - La costruzione, Rome 1941; A. De Angelis-D'Ossat, Un carattere dell'arte brunelleschiana, Rome 1942; P. Sampaolesi, B. e Donatello nella sacrestia vecchia di S. Lorenzo, Pisa 1948.
Adriano Prandi