Architecture · Classical & Renaissance
1377–1446 · Italian (Florentine)
Early Italian Renaissance
Brunelleschi was the founding architect of the Italian Renaissance and the man who worked out how to roof the enormous crossing of Florence's cathedral, which had stood open for decades. His double-shell dome, raised without centring on a herringbone brick pattern, remains the largest masonry dome ever built. He is also credited with the rediscovery of linear perspective, demonstrated in a famous experiment with a painted panel and a mirror.
A double-shelled octagonal dome of brick laid in herringbone, raised over a cathedral crossing without any wooden centring (1420–1436)
Florence, Italy
The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore — the largest brick dome ever built; the lantern was begun the year he died.
A foundling hospital whose loggia of slender columns and round arches, with blue-and-white roundels of swaddled babies in the spandrels, is called the first Renaissance building (1419–1427)
Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, Florence
The Ospedale degli Innocenti; the terracotta roundels are by Andrea della Robbia.
A grey-and-white basilica that became the Medici parish church, with an Old Sacristy under a melon-ribbed dome (begun 1419)
Florence, Italy
San Lorenzo, paid for by Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici; Michelangelo's New Sacristy was added a century later.
A small domed chapel in a Franciscan cloister, its walls ruled in grey stone, with twelve Apostle roundels in glazed terracotta (c. 1441–1478)
Santa Croce, Florence
The Pazzi Chapel, a chapter house for the Pazzi family; the roundels are by Luca della Robbia.
A late basilica of grey columns whose aisles were meant to run in a continuous ring of semicircular chapels right round the church (designed 1428; built from 1436)
Oltrarno, Florence
Santo Spirito, finished after his death and with the chapel wall flattened against his intentions.
A bronze relief of a boy on an altar and an angel seizing the knife, submitted for a 1401 competition and beaten by a rival (1401)
Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence
His Sacrifice of Isaac panel for the Baptistery doors competition, lost to Lorenzo Ghiberti; both panels survive.