> But scholars aren't quite sure how this goldsmith with no formal architectural training managed to construct it.
That's just slightly patronizing to say about a man who came up with various inventions and innovations in his time—including the first linear perspective method, among other things.
You're not kidding - I hadn't read about him before, but wow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Brunelleschi Architecture, ship engineering, mathematics and sculpture. The dome itself is the largest brick-constructed dome in the world.
Not directly related to the article but if you visit Italy make sure you go to Florence and see the dome. I was there less than a week ago, it wasn't my first time in Florence but it was the first time I went up to the lantern on the dome, it is that impressive
And the Museo Galileo https://www.museogalileo.it/en/, a History of Science museum is within a 10 minutes walk. with telescopes of Galileo, items of the Medici family, and so on.
My family didn't want to go in and I had to hurry as they waited outside, but I think people here would appreciate it a lot.
Another must-see is the museum right next to the dome, the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. Inside is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen--the hand-cast "Gates of Paradise" doors of the Baptistery, by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Simply incredible!
Fun fact about Ghiberti and the doors he made: he won a contest in 1401 to create the first set of the doors. The runner-up? Brunelleschi.
I live in Florence. I’m actually surprised you thought there were too many people in August - the city is empty because locals went to vacation, and is actually low season for hotels because many countries in Europe start schools around the 15th. I was walking last night downtown and I was impressed how empty it was :)
At the same time, weather in August is better than July and June on average — you usually get some storms and thus some relief from hot. But yes, it’s still hottish but that’s Italy.
It’s true that the best seasons would be Spring and Fall. But you get many many more tourists, longer queues, and much higher prices for hotels. So YMMV.
Spring and Fall are often the best seasons to visit Italy. Among other things, a lot of Italians go on vacation themselves in August, meaning fewer stores and things are open.
>Over the summer in 2015, Guardincerri and her students built a mock-up of the dome's thick inner shell out of radiation-shielding concrete bricks ... After just 17 days, all three iron bars were clearly visible in the resulting image.
IMO a better analogy would be him making a binary, throwing away the source code. Self-documenting code is always the most up-to-date documentation, and a valuable source of insight. Additional documentation would also be required, of course.
Given the other things that have appeard on the front page today, this is an exemplary tale of the importance of open source. Some day people could die because our software is closed and undocumented. We are not all lucky enough to build such an iconic structure that governments will fork over millions of dollars hundreds of years after our deaths to reverse engineer our code.
edit: Heh, looks like this has touched a nerve with some subset of the readership, which means that I have done my duty.
Actually we'd appreciate it if you wouldn't bring the hot flames of the day into some completely unrelated thread, thus starting them up there and hijacking the discussion. That has the same effect as trolling.
It's especially important not to this when the topic is a subtler one, because those can so easily get trampled.
> Brunelleschi built a wooden and brick model of his plan but deliberately left out crucial details and left no comprehensive blueprints so his rivals could not steal his secrets.
This sentence makes me so angry. If you’re going to come up with a great new way of doing something then the worst thing you could do is to keep it a secret so it’s impossible to figure out how it works and it ends up forgotten.
> This sentence makes me so angry. If you’re going to come up with a great new way of doing something then the worst thing you could do is to keep it a secret so it’s impossible to figure out how it works and it ends up forgotten.
It's the case for lots of inventions, the ones which are not documented end up forgotten. I could add as an example the Russian Olivier Salad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_salad), where the modern recipe only comes from a sous-chef of the original restaurant which sort-of reverse-engineered the recipe, because the recipe was totally secret. We still are not sure that recipe is exactly the same as the original one.
A family "friend" growing up made the most delicious dinner rolls. But she refused to share the recipe with anyone because they were a family secret. The pure selfishness just boggles my mind.
There was a Reddit thread about secret family recipes where a lot of them turned out to be store bought stuff prepared by following the instructions on the box.
My brother worked in an Italian restaurant that claimed to have a secret Sicilian spice blend recipe they'd kept in the family for generations. In fact it was Mrs Dash in big Costco bottles.
First, we’re taking that claimat face value, second, i imagine, he may have wanted to keep it secret so that one, if anyone wanted similar structure they have to get him to do the job or two, he didn’t want anyone else to steal his thunder.
> Thirdly, it should be pretty straightforward in 2018 to work out the details of a design from 1418.
If we could disassemble it perhaps. But destroying priceless and unique historical monuments just to find out how they were put together is frowned upon for some reason.
Would it? I would assume that it wouldn't warrant a news story in that case. Our ancestors were only a few levels lower on the tech tree; "it must be simple" doesn't follow from that.
Everything I know about this comes from the children's book "Pippo the Fool."
Rivals refers to people competing against him in a competition to build the dome. For him to win and get to build his design it was important for him to both prove it could be built and not allow other builders to also solve the design challenge.
I assume for him getting to build the dome was more important than his design ideas being forgotten.
Bare with me before downvoting (or at least write why).
At the beginning, patents were very similar to FLOSS.
Before patents, blueprints were kept secret, mechanical design was sometimes unnecessarily complex as a form of obfuscation and if someone was able to reverse engineer a product they could copy it without giving attribution.
After patents, blueprints were publicly accessible for a reasonable fee, obfuscation was less common, attribution was given and both derivative and new designs were patented as well and therefore accessible. (Sounds like GPL?)
Patents would expire in an amount of time that, at the time, was deemed reasonable. This increased competition, knowledge sharing and helped innovation.
Today's patents (especially software ones) and copyright have the opposite effect due to high costs, legal risk, absurdly long expiration times and the ability to patent obvious or old ideas.
Really? This is the first that came to mind for me. The only one that might "outrank" it in my mind is the Pantheon, but I wouldn't think anyone would refer to that as "Italy's famous dome", they'd just say "the Pantheon".
Plus the original title in the URL specifically calls it "Brunelleschi's dome", which even if you don't know/remember Brunelleschi, does rule out the Pantheon just from the name.
That's just slightly patronizing to say about a man who came up with various inventions and innovations in his time—including the first linear perspective method, among other things.