Begetter of Florence Cathedral, on the eve of the Renaissance
A late-thirteenth-century architect and sculptor of Florence. He planned and began two buildings that define the city: the magnificent Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and the Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall. For the cathedral he designed an unprecedented huge octagonal crossing — so large that no one of the time knew how to cover it with a dome. This "unfinishable" great void stood empty for over a century, until Brunelleschi built the dome with a stroke of genius — the first thunderclap of the Renaissance. The audacious, almost reckless gap Arnolfo left became a key setup for the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
The crossing Arnolfo designed for Florence Cathedral was so vast that in his day and his successors’, no known technique could dome it. The great void stood open, weathered by wind and rain, for over a century, the whole city’s ache. Not until a century later did Brunelleschi step forward to solve the "impossible," and the sky of Florence was closed over by that great dome — and the Renaissance began.
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