FLORENCE:
A PORTRAIT
By Michael Levey

On Brunelleschi's Cupola of the Duomo

"For the Duomo itself, Brunelleschi had succeeded in what had so often and long been dreamt of. He had given the Florentine their cupola, which represented a challenge of art, engineering and man-management--in terms of both organisation and of convincing the doubters. At what seemed a stroke but which had in reality taken years of labour, the final crowning of the city was achieved, the ubiquitous symbol of its might and splendour, which even in the crudest wood-cut henceforth stood for Florence. In Italy it was the dome of modern times, offspring and successor, as it were, of that of the Pantheon in Rome, and the architectural expression of the place of Florence as Rome's successor. In the enthusiastic Cronica Fiorentina (Florentine Chronicle) of Benedetto Dei, composed in 1472, `la gran chupola' is the third of the great things to show foreigners in a city that is `un' altra Roma novella'.

"Brunelleschi did not live to see the cupola entirely completed. No-nonsense but shrewd, and sharp of speech in Tuscan style, he might have smiled at the fine Latin epitaph that his `grata patria' gave him in 1446, when burying him honourably in the Duomo: the wonderful cupola of this most famous church bearing witness to his ability in `the Daedalian art'. The phrase brings back the image Andrea Pisano had sculpted in one of the Campanile reliefs, of Daedalus tough and determined and forever in the ascendant."