The new forms, of course, were old forms: those of ancient Rome. This picture of Brunelleschi as a savior sent from on high to redeem the art of building and rescue it from the barbarous, pointy-arched Gothic squalor into which it had fallen may seem, to put it mildly, a little simplified today—but, as far as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were concerned, it was the plain and only truth. Everything Brunelleschi designed and built, from the Ospedale degli Innocenti and the Pazzi Chapel to the immense octagonal dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral that dominates the city, was done in his native Florence. But many of their prototypes, the structures and remnants by which his architectural thought was stimulated, were in Rome. Brunelleschi was no copyist, but he was wide open to inspiration from the remote past. The great dome of ancient Rome, the Pantheon, is not like Brunelleschi’s dome on Santa Maria del Fiore. It is a structure that relies entirely on mass, whereas Brunelleschi’s dome is a highly sophisticated framework covered with a membrane. Nevertheless, Brunelleschi derived his language of building
Curiously, although early humanists had talked quite a lot about the physical antiquities of Rome, none of them seem to have made a concentrated effort to examine and record the ruins before Brunelleschi. Ancient Roman texts, inscriptions, and manuscripts, eagerly sought and examined by literary humanists, were of course a different matter.
Little is known about Brunelleschi’s early life, but certainly he did not begin as an apprentice architect. Though his father expected him to be a civil servant like himself, the son showed early artistic ambitions, enrolling in the Arte della Seta, the Silkworkers’ Guild, among whose members were goldsmiths and bronze workers. He had a vocation for work in gold and semi-precious metals, diligently turning himself (wrote his first biographer, Antonio Manetti, 1423–97) into “a perfect master of niello, enamel, and colored or gilded ornaments in relief, as well as the cutting, splitting, and setting of precious stones. Thus in any work to which he applied himself … he always had wonderful success.” In 1398, he was recognized as a master goldsmith. His first important building, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, or Foundlings’ Hospital, in Florence, was paid for and commissioned by the goldsmiths’ guild in 1419 and finished around 1445. With its long portico of round arcades carried on eight-meter-high Corinthian columns, it was the first clear echo of classical Roman architecture in Florence. It had resulted from a study trip Brunelleschi had made with his friend the sculptor Donatello to Rome, after they had both been narrowly defeated by Lorenzo Ghiberti in the competition for the design of the east doors of the Baptistery of Florence Cathedral. Manetti has the disappointed Brunelleschi reflecting, “It would be a good thing to go and study where sculpture is really good,” and so, around 1402–4:
He went to Rome, for at that time there were plenty of good things that could be seen in public places. Some of the things are still there, though few. Many have since been stolen … by various pontiffs and cardinals, Romans and men of other nations. While looking at the sculpture, as he had a good eye and an alert mind, he saw the way the ancients built and their proportions.… He seemed to recognize quite clearly a certain order in their members and structural parts.… It looked very different from what was usual in those times. He proposed, while he was looking at the statues of the ancients, to devote no less attention to the order and method of building.
It must have been one of the great dramas of discovery in art’s history, a Quattrocento buddy movie: Brunelleschi and Donatello, one at each end of the measuring string, flushed with effort and determination, clambering over the ruins, chopping aside the entangling bushes and creepers, measuring heights, widths, and spacings, tirelessly noting inscriptions, discovering a lost Rome. It requires a real effort of imagination to envisage what Rome looked like in those far-off days. The Forum was a kind of wilderness with ruins, commonly referred to as the Campo Vaccino—the Cow Pasture—which it actually was, with animals grazing about. Shops, restaurants, workplaces—forget them. One traversed the place by stumbling hither and thither. Nothing was self-evident, as Roman ruins are today. The city was a jumble of fallen old columns and ruinous early walls, collapsed vaults, broken arches. The Roman natives who saw them at work on their quest for “the excellent and highly ingenious building methods of the ancients and their harmonious proportions” thought they were nothing more than crazy treasure- hunters—which in a sense they were. “Neither was bothered with family cares because neither had a wife or children.… Neither was much concerned with how he ate, drank, lived, or dressed himself, provided he could satisfy himself with these things to see and measure.”
In this way, the bones of the Eternal City surrendered their secrets to Brunelleschi and Donatello, even though the latter, wrote Manetti, was not much interested in architecture as such: “Together they made rough drawings of almost all the buildings in Rome.… They had excavations done in order to see the joinings of the parts of the buildings, and whether those parts were square, polygonal, or perfectly round, circular or oval.… From these observations, with his keen vision, [Brunelleschi] began to distinguish the characteristics of each style, such as Ionic, Doric, Tuscan, Corinthian, and Attic, and he used these styles … as one may still see in his buildings.”
A powerful aid to doing this was the new system Brunelleschi was working out for representing solid objects in depth, known as linear perspective, which relies upon the fact that objects seem to get smaller the farther they are from the viewer’s eye. If a reliable way could be found to create this illusion by constructing it on a flat plane, such as the surface of a panel or a sheet of paper, then it would be possible to represent the world and its contents, such as buildings, in a coherent and perceptually accurate manner. Brunelleschi’s systematic researches were taken up by another architect—though he was much more than that—Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72). Showing the world in this way enabled the artist to give his scenes a new credibility, with what seemed to be real people moving in real space, and even, startlingly enough, showing real emotions to one another. Wrote Alberti in a 1435 treatise on painting:
I like to see someone who tells the spectators what is happening there; or beckons with his hand; or menaces with an angry face and with flashing eyes so that no one should come near; or points to some danger or marvelous thing there and invites us to weep or laugh together with them.
In Alberti’s eyes, perspective was not merely a means toward illusion—it was a tool of empathy. It helped give painting, and its representation of architecture, the dignity of a “liberal art” and raised both above the domain of mere craft.
Truth of representation, allied with a scientific and pragmatic fascination with the forms of antiquity—such was the beginning of Renaissance architecture. Its canonical early buildings were raised not in Rome but in Florence; yet they would not have existed without the examples of Roman antiquity, as interpreted by Brunelleschi and Alberti.
Alberti’s likeness was cast in a bronze medal in 1454–56 by the sculptor Matteo de’ Pasti. On one side is a profile portrait of Alberti, a strikingly handsome man of fifty. The reverse shows his
