Rachel’s Reviews > Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture > Status Update

'Lorenzo's physicians attempted to avert the fate, feeding him potions made from pulverized diamonds and pearls, and cautioning him to avoid both grape pips and the air at sunset, two things considered fatal to a man and his condition.' Thank G-d we don't live in the fifteenth century!

'The Villa Careggi was the country home of Lorenzo de' Medici...the ruler of Florence and a generous patron of the arts. To Lorenzo, lying ill with a fever in the villa, the meaning of the destructive strike was unmistakable: "I am a dead man!" he exclaimed upon being told in which direction the rubble had fallen.'

Vasari was to claim that the heavens themselves are envious of the dome, since every day it is struck by lightning...The most dramatic of these blows fell on April 5th, 1492, when a lightning bolt sent several tons of marble cascading into the streets on the north side of the cupola, in the direction of the Villa Careggi, which stands in the hills above Florence.

'As such, architecture ranked even lower than the"arts of amusement," which included such things as fashioning machinery for stage plays.'

'Cicero claimed that architecture was a manual art on the same level as farming, tailoring, and metalworking, while in his Moral Letters Seneca mired it in the lowest of the four categories of art, those which he classified as volgares et sordidae, "common and low." Such arts were mere handiwork, he claimed, and had no pretense to beauty or honor.'

'Part of the reason for this anonymity was a prejudice against manual labor on the part of both ancient and medieval authors, who assigned architecture a low place in human achievement, regarding it as an occupation unfit for an educated man.'

'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").'

'A familiar scapegoat was used to explain the Florentine's ineptness in battle: homosexuality...So famous was Florence for homosexual activity that during the fourteenth century the German slang for "sodomite" was Florenzer.'

'Like many medieval cities, Lucca had suffered a checkered past, passing from the hands of one warring state to another. In the previous hundred years it had been occupied by the Bavarians, sold to the Genoese, seized by the king of Bohemia, pawned to Parma, ceded to Verona, and finally sold to Florence.'

'These engagements were fought by mercenaries who settled the terms of warfare in advance, rather like sportsmen deciding the rules of a game...By common agreement the armies declined to fight in certain conditions: at night, in winter, on steep slopes, or on boggy ground.'