Filippo Brunelleschi

Trained as a goldsmith and enrolled in the Florentine silk guild, Brunelleschi came to architecture through metalwork, clockmaking and a documented study of Roman ruins. His reputation rests on the double-shell dome he raised over Santa Maria del Fiore between 1420 and 1436 without the timber centring every earlier builder would have thought indispensable, solving a problem the cathedral works had left open for a century. He also built the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo and the Pazzi Chapel, and both Vasari and his fifteenth-century biographer Antonio Manetti credit him with the first demonstrations of linear perspective. His architecture is grey pietra serena drawn as line against white plaster; his engineering, from the hoists to the herringbone brick coursing, was as inventive as his ornament was restrained.