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The Renaissance

The Cathedral of Florence

The audio gifDuomo (cathedral) of Florence is the pride of the city, and deservedly so--it is a beautiful structure. It was begun in the 1290s by audio gifCambio. He designed an ambitious, even heroic, building, but did not live to see it more than barely begun.

The Duomo was designed in the usual style, in the form of a cross. The outer walls are striking with their elegant green and red and yellow sandstone, and the whole is as Italian and un- Gothic as any building in Italy. Construction was under the supervision of the Wool Merchants Guild, which conducted the original design bidding and oversaw the project once under way.

The usual vicissitudes of Italian city-state politics, coupled with uneven economic fortunes and the devastating effects of plague, combined to stretch the construction of the cathedral over the course of a century and a little more. Successive generations of architects brought the cathedral along, but every generation recognized and avoided the central and seemingly unsolvable problem of the dome.

The area where the arms of the building crossed was a huge expanse, 140 feet across, and putting a roof over that wide space was the problem that vexed each architect in turn. Giotto himself had no solution, merely indicating that a dome should go there but not how to manage the feat.

A dome there had to be. Nothing else would be appropriate, and it had been designed that way. The problem was, no one knew how to build a dome so large. So, successive architects had completed every other part of the cathedral and had carefully avoided tackling the dome; they had, in the meantime, placed a flat roof over the space. By 1410, however, there was nothing left to be done.

The problems were prodigious. The dome had to span a space of 140 feet. It had to be built atop walls that were over two hundred feet high, so that even the initial construction entailed great feats of engineering. Even so, there was the pride of the city, all finished but looking curiously truncated. The city decided to hold a competition, to receive proposals, and to choose from among them. The call went out in 1417.