Flippo Brunelleschi Accomplishments

Filippo Brunelleschi was an Italian architect born in Florence in 1377. He devoted most of his life to the arts and architecture and is most known for building a dome with linear perspective. Many people consider him to be the first modern engineer and a founding father of the renaissance. Most of the information known about him was gathered by Antonio di Tuccio Manetti an Italian mathematician and artechit who wrote his biography. Other information was collected by Giorgio Vasari, even though he is considered a secondary source ,he wrote about Filippo Brunelleschi in his book about famous renaissance painters, sculptors and architects.

Early Life, Filippo Brunelleschi was born in Florence in 1377 to Brunellesco Di Lippo and Giuliana Spini.

He was extremely interested in Roman engineering, the use of fixed proportion and Roman vaults. He would draw Roman architecture and figure out how to build it, he was hoping to enrich the engineering of his own time by accomplishing this. The pantheon dome intrigued him and most likely inspired his work on the Cupola del Brunelleschi. The most impressive achievement for him however was rediscovering linear perspective in Rome. He began to see how objects are perceived by the human eye. He realized that all objects have a vanishing point and used this to draw many buildings and scenes of Florence with this new idea. He discovered this principle by using mirrors. Many years after his death renaissance painters still used his idea of linear perspective which was responsible for realism in paintings. Without him renaissance paintings and our idea of architecture today could not be the same as it

The dome was only slightly smaller than the pantheon in Rome which would be a challenge to make a dome of this size. Most dome of this time were built by wooden scaffolding but there was not enough wood in Tuscany for this. The pantheon was built with concrete but the recipe had been lost in the fall of Rome. Mortar at this time took several days to set which would cause a problem for building. He decided to build a hemispherical inner dome and a second ovoid brick dome on the outside. Nine sandstone rings held the structure together making both self supporting. This was thought up based on Roman principles he learned of from his journey in Rome. At the bottom of the structure he used stone and at the top he used bricks made of sandstone. To hoist all of the materials up he invented a hoist with the first reverse gear. Leonardo da Vinci was incredibly impressed with his machines. When he was first appointed to work on the project Lorenzo Ghiberti was his assistant but latter he was the head of the project. Filippo Brunelleschi had no experience in building like this before but was able to keep his workers sober by watering down wine and providing lunch. He also got safety nets so in the end only three people were killed working on the dome. Later he designed a lantern to hang on the dome and