#Florence’s most famous cathedral, Saint Mary of the Flower, is featured prominently in Netflix’s #Medici, #Hannibal and other movies and shows. Here’s the history of that beautiful building and its amazing dome!
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The cathedral’s first stone was laid on September 8, 1296 and construction continued for about a century and a half. The plans for the cathedral evolved as different builders took over the project. When completed in the 1400s, it was the largest church in Europe.
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Today, it is the third largest church in the world (after St. Peter's in Rome and St. Paul's in London). It is 153 metres long, 90 metres wide at the crossing, and 90 metres high from the floor to the bottom of the lantern.
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The marble-clad cathedral was built around the smaller cathedral that it replaced. The Church of Santa Reparata was left in place for 60 years so there could be services during the building of the new church. After the new cathedral was built, the old church was torn down.
The space for the dome was left open to the elements for decades for the simple reason that there was no known way to build such a large dome. Florence was determined to outdo its rival cities, like Milan, and build something grander than what those cities had...
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...for their cathedrals. Florence officials took on faith that a solution would one day be found and the dome would be completed.
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Florence was also determined to build the dome without flying buttresses, a common feature on many other medieval churches that supported the weight of stone walls, (i.e. Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris).
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How to build a dome with such a huge octagonal (not round) shape baffled engineers and architects for years. While domes existed in Italy – i.e. the Pantheon in Rome - those domes were constructed with concrete and the recipe for concrete had been lost in the Dark Ages...
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...along with other vital knowledge of Roman building techniques.
Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith, won a competition in 1418 for his innovative design for the dome - even though he had no training as an architect and had never built anything.
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The dome is actually 2 domes that were built without any scaffolding or supports. The inner shell (with a thickness of more than 2 metres) is made of light bricks set in a herringbone pattern that allowed the bricks to self-reinforce as they were being laid so...
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...they wouldn't fall off the wall as it became more inclined. The outer dome simply serves as a heavier, wind-resistant covering.
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The inner dome was built with five horizontal stone, wood and chain hoops – like the hoops around a barrel – that held the dome together and eliminated the need for supports like flying buttresses. This technique had never been used in dome construction and...
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...it is still considered a remarkable engineering innovation.
Brunelleschi was very secretive and he didn’t leave any documents behind that explained his amazing design. Even today, we do not know all the details of how he built the dome.
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The dome was completed in 1434 after 16 years of planning and construction. It is still the largest masonry dome in the world. It has over 4 million bricks, weighing over 40,000 tons. It is 10 stories high and almost the size of half a football field across at the base.
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The challenges of building the dome required Brunelleschi to also invent new machines to make the dome’s construction possible. For example, he invented an ox-driven hoist that lifted heavy stones hundreds of feet into the air.
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The hoist was gear-driven with a clutch that allowed it to be reversed without reversing the direction of the oxen.
Brunelleschi noticed that marble for the project was being damaged as it was unloaded from boats so he invented an amphibious boat that could also be used...
...on land to transport the large pieces of marble to the cathedral.
The building of Florence’s iconic dome kicked off the architectural Renaissance and it is still considered an extraordinary achievement centuries later.
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