Brunelleschis Dome (19 page)

Lucca had been the first city in Tuscany to adopt Christianity. According to legend it had been converted by St. Frediano, an Irish monk who saved the city from flooding by diverting the dangerously swollen river Serchio. Perhaps inspired by this legend, Filippo proposed to reverse the saint’s miracle by altering the course of the Serchio and stranding Lucca in the middle of a lake contained by a dam. Cut off from the countryside, the Lucchese would have little recourse but to surrender.

Filippo’s plan was not an original one. Hydraulic engineering was used in warfare even in ancient times. In 510
B.C.
, for instance, Milo, the ruler of Croton and patron of Pythagoras, diverted the river Crathis and flooded the warring town of Sybaris, an ancient city in southern Italy which archaeologists have only recently uncovered. Some two hundred years later Sostratus of Cnidus captured Memphis for Ptolemy I, the king of Egypt, by changing the course of the Nile and dividing the town in two. More recently a Florentine engineer named Domenico di Benintendi had constructed for Giangaleazzo Visconti a number of gigantic dikes with which the duke hoped to redirect the river Mincio and flood the city of Mantua under 20 feet of water. The plan was never put into effect, though the remains of one of these dikes may still be seen at Valeggio. Fortunately, the duke was also unable to carry through another of his ambitious plans: to drain the canals of Venice, thereby rendering the Venetians defenseless.

Filippo appears to have acquired some expertise in hydraulic engineering a short time before the Lucca project. During the late 1420s he traveled to Siena to consult with Taccola, whose specialty it was. Hydraulics enjoyed a long tradition in Siena, where the shortage of water had been remedied by the construction during the Middle Ages of the
bottini
, 16 miles of underground tunnels, complete with filters and settling tanks, that conveyed fresh water to the city. During Taccola’s time this supply of water was being increased and numerous fountains built. Taccola’s
De Ingeneis
, the treatise that depicted
Il Badalone,
showed how to build dams, bridges, flood controls, underwater foundations, aqueducts, and various other waterworks.

In a manuscript discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, Taccola records a conversation with Filippo that took place during this visit to Siena. Although Filippo is not known to have had any practical experience of hydraulic engineering before the Lucca project, he nevertheless speaks with some authority on the subject, exchanging ideas with Taccola on the best means of building dams and bridges. Special attention was given to sinking their foundations. Filippo warned Taccola that if the riverbed consisted of large pieces of tufa — the lightweight, porous rock that the
capomaestro
had considered using in the upper part of the dome — it was better not to drive piles, since they would break the tufa and cause the water to flow through, carrying away the dam or bridge. These words of caution turned out to be lamentably ironic. Despite Filippo’s theoretical preparations for the project, his enormous dam was a failure. Indeed, the Lucca disaster would be much more harmful to Filippo’s reputation than the wreck of
Il Badalone
.

Work on the project proceeded slowly due to a lack of funds. Then doubts were raised about the strength of the dam even before it was completed. In May 1430 the notary in the Florentine camp outside Lucca wrote to the War Office that after studying Filippo’s design he remained unconvinced that the dam could withstand the weight of the water. But his arguments were skillfully parried by the
capomaestro
: “To everything Pippo replies with arguments I cannot contradict,” wrote the flustered notary, “though I do not know if this is because I do not know more of this matter. Soon we shall see what will come of all of this.”

Others in the Florentine camp were even more pessimistic about the project. Rather than arguing with Filippo, as the notary had done, Neri Capponi, the commissioner for the Florentine army, simply sent his men to inspect the dam and make up their own minds about its robustness. Apparently one did not need to be an expert in hydraulics in order to realize that Filippo’s plan was ripe for miscarriage.

Filippo ignored these warnings, evidently unchastened by his humiliating disaster with
Il Badalone
, whose cargo, these two years later, he was still attempting to recover. His stubbornness on the issue was the result of his usual contempt for his critics. After all, had not his designs for the dome been mocked in the same way? And was not the dome, by all accounts, a great success? In his conversation with Taccola he had condemned the
capocchis et ignorantibus
, “blockheads and ignoramuses,” who could not understand the schemes of inventors like himself:

Every person wishes to know of the proposals, the learned and the ignorant. The learned understands the work proposed — he understands at least something, partly or fully — but the ignorant and inexperienced understand nothing, not even when things are explained to them. Their ignorance moves them promptly to anger. They remain in ignorance because they want to show themselves learned, which they are not, and they move the other ignorant crowd to insistence on its own poor ways and to scorn for those who know.
²

The only thing to be done with such idiots, he claimed, was to march them off to war. These remarks were recorded before the Lucca enterprise: after the debacle his plans for his critics may have been even less charitable.

Like the Florentines, the Lucchese must have realized that Filippo’s project was far from foolproof. Initially they countered the attempt to flood the plain by building dams of their own, raising a number of high embankments that prevented the water from flowing in the planned direction. But the Lucchese were not content with these defensive maneuvers, and so one night, in a brilliant military sortie, one of their garrisons sneaked into Florentine territory and breached the canal that Filippo had dug at its point of deviation from the Serchio. The plain around Lucca was flooded, just as Filippo had predicted. However, the result was (as Machiavelli would sardonically remark in his history of Florence) “contrary to his expectations”: with devastating force the waters of the river swept away the dam and, worse still, flooded the Florentine camp. Instead of attacking Lucca, as planned, the Florentines were forced to beat a hasty retreat to higher ground. Besides his reputation as an engineer, Filippo left behind something else on the swamped field outside Lucca: the tax reports for 1431 reveal that he lost his bed, which had been kept in his tent in the Florentine camp.

The war went from bad to worse. Eager to weaken Florence, the duke of Milan dispatched troops to Lucca. The Florentines countered by bribing the duke’s military commander, Count Sforza, to quit the city. Sforza duly departed from Lucca, but in the battle that followed, the Florentines were soundly defeated. Morale ebbed swiftly away.

Filippo was not alone in being blamed for the defeat. A familiar scapegoat was used to explain the Florentines’ ineptness in battle: homosexuality. For years clergymen such as the Franciscan firebrand Bernardino of Siena had been raging from the pulpit that the crime of sodomy was destroying the city. So famous was Florence for homosexual activity that during the fourteenth century the German slang for “sodomite” was
Florenzer
. In 1432 the government took steps to curtail this perceived root of its troubles on the battlefield by establishing an agency to identify and prosecute homosexuals, the Ufficiali di Notte, “Office of the Night” (a name made even more colorful by the fact that
notte
was slang for “bugger”). This vice squad worked in tandem with the Orwelliansounding Ufficiali dell’Onestà, “Office of Decency,” which was charged with licensing and administering the municipal brothels that had been created in the area around the Mercato Vecchio.
*
The specific aim of these public brothels was to wean Florentine men from the “greater evil” of sodomy. Prostitutes became a common sight in Florence, not least because the law required them to wear distinctive garb: gloves, high-heeled shoes, and a bell on the head.

Despite these measures the Florentines fared little better on the battlefield. The duke of Milan persuaded Genoa, Siena, and Piombino to enter into a league against the battered Republic. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Florentines sued for peace, and a truce was finally signed in 1433, though hostilities with Milan would not really end until the duke’s death over a decade later.

T
HE WAR AGAINST
Lucca took a severe toll on the building site at Santa Maria del Fiore. As the campaign began, the wages of most of the masons were halved, with some salaries falling much more drastically, from 1 lira per day to a positively stingy 1 lira per month. Even Filippo himself faced a pay cut: his salary dropped from 100 florins per year to 50. Then in December 1430 over forty masons on the building site and in the quarries at Trassinaia were made redundant, partly because of the cold weather but also to save money. Construction throughout Florence had ground to a halt as funds intended for various buildings (including the oratory of Santa Maria degli Angeli, another of Filippo’s projects) were diverted to the war effort. As commissions dried up, many artists, including Donatello, left Florence for more peaceful, prosperous cities.

Given this belt-tightening regime, Filippo had selected a truly unfavorable moment to press his expensive plan to remodel the cathedral with a ring of chapels. Predictably his model met with little enthusiasm among the wardens, who decided to go for a cheaper option and reinforce the nave of the church with visible iron tie rods. Filippo accepted their decision, but only grudgingly. At the beginning of 1431 he designed a model for these rods and subsequently won the commission to install them. Within a month of this commission a significant decision was taken by the wardens: they ordered that Neri di Fioravanti’s 1367 model should be destroyed. The cupola, they reasoned, was now “beyond all comparison” with Neri’s model. This was not to say that Filippo had violated the model, but that, with the structure so close to completion, Neri’s model had lost its function as a touchstone, and building could continue without any further reference to it.

In the end, both iron and wooden ties were used to prevent further cracks in the nave. Owing to his lack of enthusiasm for this solution, Filippo proceeded at a fairly leisurely pace in their installation, and in May 1433 the wardens had to order him to hurry up. A year later, after the work was completed, he complained about their ugliness in a submission to the Opera. He believed that if his proposed chapels were built, these eyesores could be removed, and so once again he began pressing the wardens to reconsider his plan. Although they allowed him to complete his abandoned model, their final answer was categorical: he was to forget his ring of chapels and concentrate instead on completing the dome. The wardens, understandably, were impatient to see the structure finished. They had been hoping to hold services under the cupola in 1433, but this timetable had been grossly optimistic, and eighteen months later, when they came together to discuss Filippo’s model for the chapels, the date of completion seemed no nearer.

This episode marks one of the few times that Filippo was unable to win over the wardens to his point of view. But his annoyance must have been eclipsed by other, more pressing worries, for in August 1433, just a few days after the meeting of the wardens and Wool Guild consuls, he was arrested and thrown into prison. His crime: failing to pay his annual dues to the Masons Guild.

The Arte dei Maestri di Pietra e di Legname (Guild of Stonemasons and Carpenters) was one of the largest of the Florentine guilds. It was run, like the other guilds, not so much for the benefit of its members — the common laborers and stonemasons — as for the political elite of the city. The guilds were the nominal foundation of the Republican constitution, because membership in one of them was a qualification for any political office. But power had actually come to be concentrated in the guild court of the Mercanzia, which had been founded in 1309 and was controlled by a network of wealthy, intermarrying, and often rival families, including the Capponi, the Medici, the Strozzi, the Bardi, and the Spini. Through the Mercanzia this economic elite extended its power into the running of the other guilds, controlling the selection of candidates eligible for guild office.

In the Middle Ages the masons guilds of northern Europe had become the jealous guardians of the “mysteries” of their profession. In a famous case from 1099, for example, the Bishop of Utrecht was murdered by a master mason whose son he had persuaded to reveal the secret of laying out the foundation of a church. There were, of course, obvious reasons for maintaining a monopoly on this sort of information: the masons had an economic interest in not disseminating their knowledge beyond the guild.

In Florence, however, the Masons Guild was never so obsessively jealous of its secrets. It was possible not only for carpenters and masons from outside Florence to practice their craft within the city but also for craftsmen from other guilds to work in the building trade. The guild did not seem anxious to require membership of such men, much less dues. Neither Giotto nor Andrea Pisano, two previous
capomaestri
, ever joined it. Filippo had even been granted an exemption that permitted him to work as an architect without having matriculated in the guild, a fact that made the sudden demand for membership dues — and his arrest — all the more bizarre.

Filippo’s arrest is certainly suspicious. The dues for one year would have amounted to the grand total of 12 soldi, or roughly the amount that a common laborer on the site of Santa Maria del Fiore could earn in a single day of work. Surviving records show that, despite this modest rate, the accounts of many members of the guild were in arrears.
¹
But only Filippo was ever arrested and imprisoned for nonpayment. Clearly sinister forces were at work to ruin the
capomaestro
.