 We are going to continue talking about the renaissance in Florence, particularly the early moments of the renaissance. And the superstar for that period in the world of architecture is Filippo Brunaleschi. We already spoke a little bit about him on our previous classes, specifically relating to two, or let's say even three of his endeavors. One, the construction of the great dome on the Florence Cathedral. Two, his pathetic loser attempt to win the competition for the bronze doors at the baptistry. And three, his test of perspective. His attempt to find a way to make perspectival representation of space captured three-dimensional vision on a two-dimensional surface mathematical. And that test was done over here between the Duomo, which is Italian for Cathedral, and the baptistry. We're going to look at a number of sites where Brunaleschi worked. And it's going to be very easy. Anytime you have to identify a building by Brunaleschi, it's always going to be in Florence. He was a Florentine and pretty much with the exception of a period of time that he went to Rome to study the Roman ruin. To go to the Forum, the Roman Fora, to sketch, but not just to sketch for the idea that these are pretty things. I want to get a sense of what the pretty things are, but to try to unearth the principles of antiquity. How did they do it? How did they make a vault? How did they proportion their buildings? What was their technique of stone cutting? Brunaleschi was a real practical man. And by practical, I mean he had his hands in marble dust and he had hammers in his hands chiseling away at things. So he was interested in the technology of the Romans as well as in their formal organizations. So these are a couple of sites that we'll see. We've already looked at the Duomo. Here's San Lorenzo, which is a church that he did early in his career. Here's Santo Spirito across the Arno River, which he did a bit later. And here is another Arnofo di Cambio church, Santa Croce. But a little chapel is tucked away in a courtyard there, and that is the Pazzi Chapel. So just to review the bronze door competition, we saw that there was something quite extraordinary going on in the panels. Both the panels presented by Lorenzo Ghiberti, the ultimate winner of the competition, and Filippo Brunaleschi. And that was they were really interested, not simply in representing a kind of iconological program. This represents this. This reminds you of this Bible story. But they were interested in situating these scenes in the space of the world. They were interested in creating a landscape that the characters could act out in. And they were also taking a very new interest in the human body. You see it in the Brunaleschi over here. You see it, I think, even more powerfully in the representation of Isaac in the Ghiberti panel, where a classical nude, this fully contrapostal classical nude is being represented really for the first time since late antiquity. The human body, instead of being something that was a repository of sin and corruption and decay, once again became viewed as something that had the divine in it and therefore was worthy of study. Notice also some other things that are going on in these panels. An interest in antiquity, an interest in recreating the forms of antiquity, the costumes of antiquity, the sarcophagi of antiquity used here for the altar, the draperies of antiquity. Having suffered the loss of a whole class of master craftsmen during the Black Death, the people in the late 1300s, early 1400s, took that as an opportunity to go and look at how Rome did stuff. Hence Brunaleschi's time digging around in the Fora, and hence these kinds of works that we see here. And we also observed last time that as the doors progressed, the ambitions to represent space and the ambitions to represent a classical kind of architecture became more and more and more advanced. So if we look at these panels from the Gates of Paradise, we see a very deep space represented with fully decked out Roman figures and a perspective. And the perspective is so suspect as a way to represent things because it has to do with subjective vision. And throughout antiquity and even through the Middle Ages, the notion that your senses could give you reliable information was really, really suspect. But yet here we have it. And one reason we have it is through this idea of Neoplatonism, which is an idea that already emerged in late antiquity but really became popularized in the Renaissance as people tried to recover the ancient way of thinking. That's a perky little guy, isn't it? Some of the first people to reinvestigate these thoughts were these late Gothic figures, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca. If you are familiar with Dante's divine comedy, it has to do with this trip to the underworld where he's being led by Virgil into the world of the dead. And Virgil is explaining things as he goes along. And even the conceit of the divine comedy of using this great ancient writer, Virgil, as the person to show him the way and to explain the truths is beginning to suggest a recognition that the ancients had a kind of wisdom and a kind of access to truths that had become lost. And in fact it was Petrarch who really invented the concept of the Dark Ages, this thousand years of darkness that separated people from this glorious moment of human achievement called antiquity. Hence initiates this desire to return to antiquity and in the late 1300s and let's say early 1400s under the patronage of the Medici family this attempt to recover the classics of antiquity and the techniques of antiquity became formalized. Here we see the Medici and this is their little coat of arms. So if you're ever wandering around Italy and you see that little coat of arms you'll know that the Medici paid for it. These are just several members of the Medici family. These are from a painting by Bronzino, a mannerist painter, and this is from a painting by Botticelli. Cosmo de Medici I think is important because he founded an academy called the Platonic Academy. Platonic looking at the thinking of Plato, looking at the philosophy of Plato but also looking widely beyond the philosophy of Plato and looking at Arabic texts and having them translated. Getting all the books that existed together and having people study them so that Florence in 1400 could become as capable of sophistication as Rome in its heyday. This is the son of Cosmo de Medici Lorenzo, the magnificent, il magnifico and he continued this tradition of patronage particularly he was a great patron to for example Michelangelo and one reason he was such a great patron to Michelangelo actually took the young Michelangelo into the house and raised him with the Medici children because he seemed to be so talented and that someone that smart shouldn't simply be using his hands and breathing in marble dust but he should be exposed to the finest thoughts. So you get this kind of catapulting of sophistication in terms of the ambition of the artists in the Renaissance because theory is being pumped into them through this official academy of the Platonic Academy and also through the embrace of artists into the inner circle of these intellectual groups. These are just some members of the Platonic Academy in a fresco by Villalindayo, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Merendola and Pico spoke 32 languages. He was the first person for example to figure out or let's say at least to try to figure out Hebrew Kabbalah and take the numeric lessons of the Kabbalah and somehow try to infuse those with Roman ideas about proportion and he was also fluent in Arabic and Persian and all of these other languages had a great literature that could amplify the sophistication of the way that the characters in Florence in the 1400s could organize their thinking. This is a kind of basic diagram of how Neoplaton is a transforms Plato's understanding of the world. Essentially Plato says beauty is an illusion and it's not trustworthy because everything that you see and that you think is beautiful comes through your senses and your senses are corrupt and subjective. Only ideals and ideas are real. Therefore the only true understanding you can have of the world is a completely rational understanding. So I believe in a square. I'm not so sure about a flower. I can explain the square numerically. The flower baffles me. I don't even know if you see flowers. I can't describe them precisely enough to make sure that this is communicable knowledge. And Neoplatonism believes that beauty is a direct emanation of God's glory. That it's something that cuts through the murk of subjective sensation. And that if you see something beautiful you recognize it as beautiful and you are glimpsing God. And so to contemplate beauty is to contemplate God and therefore the physical world becomes an object worthy of study and worthy of attention. And so it's this kind of thinking really that's making Brunelleschi and Giberti and the bronze door competitions start looking at the world. The beauty of the world, the beauty of the human body, these are things that you can think about again because they are direct emanations of God's glory. Were the beauty of the human body particularly taken figure sculpted? There was a belief that there were analogical reflections between the ancients and their kind of pagan deities and characters in Pantheon of Christian saints and biblical characters. And this is just a little drawing showing you the goal of the Neoplatonists to reach beyond the limited scope of the sublunary world, this world on earth, and to get a glimpse of heaven through these contemplative acts. Central to this whole Neoplatonic way of thinking was the idea of the microcosm and the macrocosm. And the microcosm, hmm, micro, big or small, what do you think? Small, right? The microcosm is a small world. A cosmos is a world. And the macrocosm is a big world. So you might say the most macro of all the macrocosms is the universe. And micro can get as small as you want. It could be an atom. Have you ever noticed how the electrons orbiting around a nucleus look a lot like a solar system, for example? Of course, they didn't know about atoms in those days, but they knew about other things that had analogical reflection from one scale to another. Medicine, for example, would have been organized based on similarities of appearance. Like if you have a headache, you want to eat a food that looks like a brain. So what would you eat? What would be a good thing to eat if you wanted to be a medieval doctor, a late medieval doctor? What food looks like a brain? You could say get a brain. You could go get a cow brain. But no, they were clever. They wanted something micro. So a walnut would be a good thing, right? You crack open a walnut. You see this microcosm of a brain? You eat it and bye-bye a headache. There was this interest not only in studying the platonic forms that give you one kind of truth, but also finding projections of these mathematical forms in the human figure. And Vitruvius gives us a clue on how to do that. We spoke before about the Vitruvian man somehow microcosmically reflecting the order of the universe and generating and being contained by the order of these perfect geometric figures. These are two drawings that show you a principle called harmony of the spheres, which was much believed in. It has to do with the notion of macrocosm and microcosm. At the most macro scale, the spheres are the heavenly orbs. The sun, the moon, Venus, Mars, that's about all they had. They couldn't see all the heavenly orbs that we can see. So they believed that there was a distance between all of the things up in the sky. This was a fixed distance, never changing and divinely proportioned. So that there was something about the space between the orbits of different planets or the elements in the sky that was true macrocosmic reflection of a mathematical order. And that you could find microcosmic reflections of that kind of beautiful divine order in things like music. So this drawing shows you three flutes of different lengths. And the flutes of different lengths produce different sounds. And if you play all three flutes together, you get a harmony. And the suggestion would be that the harmony produced by flutes of different lengths was a microcosmic reflection of the harmony of the spheres, the divine proportioning of heavenly bodies up above. And likewise, over here we have strings for a lute or a violin or whatever they might have had. You pluck the strings, the lengths of the strings produce a harmony that's not so different from the harmony you get from the flutes of different lengths, which of course is microcosmically reflective of the harmony of the spheres. And so too, and here we see a compass. If you want to make something beautiful, if you want to make a figure in the visual arts that's beautiful, the same proportioning system that works in music that is reflective of the harmony of the spheres also works in architecture or drawing. So people are very obsessed with proportion, not simply because proportion confers beauty, which it might, which they believed it did, but because proportion contains divine truth within it. So certain geometrical figures like the circle, because they are circle or microcosmic reflections of the heavens, Plato tells us that the heavens are spherical, and the proportional systems are showing us something about the harmony of the spheres. So a lot of the theory that people use to organize buildings in the Renaissance is not just a theory aimed at achieving beauty, but it's this neoplatonic idea about beauty, that beauty is a kind of truth that gives you a glimpse into divine beauty. And I guess one more thing worth mentioning about the neoplatonic theory is that there was a, certainly under the Platonic Academy of Cosimo de Medici, there was a belief that mythological characters, these pagan gods, were parallel and allegories for biblical truths. And therefore this whole subject matter, the whole subject matter of antiquity became a fair game for artists in the Renaissance. This is Botticelli's birth of Venus, and it is one of the most famous paintings, probably you've all seen this one before. It's a beautiful female nude, her hair blowing in the wind, in a landscape surrounded by these allegorical figures. And it's an astonishing subject matter, particularly given the fact that Botticelli was among the most severely religious people in the Renaissance. He was a follower of Savanarola, who initiated this program called the Bonfire of the Vanities, where all the mirrors were collected in Florence and burnt, and books that were frivolous were burnt, paintings were burnt, cosmetics were burnt, pictures that did not seem to be sufficiently pious in their subject matter were burnt. But the birth of Venus was fine, because the birth of Venus somehow suggested something about the virgin birth of Christ and the immaculate conception of the virgin, and therefore this is fine, do not burn this one. These are just a couple of drawings by Leonardo. The point here is that the human body is studied not simply for its geometry, which is what the Vitruvian man diagram suggests, but also here Leonardo is beginning to think about the human body in its varied specificity. He can sketch all kinds of old people or deformed people or fetuses. He just had a kind of scientific curiosity about looking closely at the world and recording the things that he saw in a way that could move him forward. We spoke last time about Brunelleschi and the dome, the great dome of the Florence Cathedral, and one way he was able to do that was by going off to Rome and looking at the antiquities. This is not a Brunelleschi sketch, but this is a sketch by a Dutch artist called Martin van Heemskijk. This is the kind of stuff he would have seen. He would have seen more than you would see if you went to the Forum today, because it turns out that Roman antiquities are very convenient quarries, so for the last, oh, I don't know, couple of hundred years, let's say, people have just been, anytime they needed a piece of stone, they would take a piece of the Colosseum and use that then to go off to a real stone quarry. So much of Renaissance and Baroque Italy was built out of the great stone quarry called the Forum by just taking columns and whatever they might want. But you can see that there still is quite a lot, like here's a triumphal arch, which is an interesting thing to study. These are various fragments of temples showing the different orders, things that Brunelleschi looked at. But when it came time to solve the question of the dome, Brunelleschi found that he really couldn't use Roman precedents because the challenge he had was a different challenge than one that could be solved using Roman technology. He was left this octagonal crossing, big hole in the middle of the Florence Cathedral. No dome could be put on it because Arnolfo de Cambio died and nobody knew how to do it. So you can see something about how Brunelleschi solved the problem. And that is, he had a kind of gothic way of working, you might say. He had a ribbed structure for the dome, a series of vertical ribs that translated the load to these points on the piers. And he also had a double shell, which is quite ingenious, sort of taking the idea of coffering from antiquity but doing it in a ribbed fashion. So you end up having a series of vertical ribs but interlaced with the vertical ribs, you have a series of horizontal rings. And so it's like the coffering. It's not expressed. It's a kind of interior structure caught between the double shells of the dome. Fabulous. And it's 140 feet in span, which is quite amazing, and 180 feet off the ground. So last time I mentioned that Brunelleschi reinvent hoists to get the material up there, 180 feet is like a 17-story building that is not an easy distance to negotiate. And he kept his workmen up there all day. He didn't let them go down for lunch. And so the dome eventually got built. That wasn't a good opportunity for Brunelleschi to demonstrate this interest in the classics or to demonstrate what he learned by looking at the Roman Forum. For example, the technological requirements necessary to put a dome on the Florence Cathedral really made Brunelleschi move closer to Gothic examples than to classic ones. Even the characteristic pointed geometry of the dome of the Florence Cathedral is much closer in shape than, say, the Romanesque dome of the Pisa Cathedral than anything Brunelleschi would have seen in Rome. But here's a very early project by Brunelleschi, the Ospeda Le Dei de Linochetti. You can call it the Hospital of the Innocence or the Orphanage, because that's what it was. And it's over here, and really Brunelleschi's contribution is fairly modest. He's building the façade on this nice square. And so how do you make a façade? And Brunelleschi here remembers what he saw in Rome. He saw arches. He saw Corinthian columns. And he comes up with this very beautiful, rhythmic solution of a series of nice round-headed arches on really delicate Corinthian columns. This is an interesting project because it's not very Roman. Romans wouldn't do that. Romans wouldn't put arches on little thin columns because Romans know that you need a lot of mass to keep the columns from kicking outwards because of the lateral thrust. As long as you have another arch next to it, you're okay, because the lateral thrust of this one is counteracted by the lateral thrust of this one. And what Brunelleschi always does, and I always find these moments to be so charming, is that he struggles to find a way to deal with the odd condition. You know, when Brunelleschi is doing this, there is no playbook. Nobody has thought about these things for a long time. He can't just look at what the last guy did. He has to try to figure it out. And so his way of figuring out what to do is he wants to keep it slender, but he also wants to resist the lateral thrust. He's a practical man. He's a good engineer. And so he takes this little detail from a triumphal arch of superimposing a traviated structure over an arcuated structure so that he gets to match the little column, but he also gets to put enough of a robust structure there. Sort of sweet. And these little medallions by Luca della Robbia that he has here get squashed together so that the dimension of this piece of spandrel doesn't become too visually out of kilter with a flender spandrel that he has going on there. So this is just a detail of that odd man-out condition. And you can see in this photograph that there are a lot of really odd conditions that Brunelleschi knows have to be solved and he hasn't figured out how to solve these. Like, what do you do on the inside? Because he's got a couple of problems that he wants to deal with. The problem is he wants to have square bays because a square is a good geometry. A square is a rational geometry. A square is a divine geometry. So how do you get square bays and also have the column in it? The dimension of the column throws the geometry of the square out of whack. So Brunelleschi doesn't have any great idea, but he deals with it by putting these little brackets here, Corinthian brackets. It's a gothic device. It's not really much of a Renaissance device, but they receive the arch, and they pick up the arch so you have an articulation of the bay, but you also have the geometry of the square. These are just a couple of the idiosyncratic conditions that Brunelleschi deploys in order to solve this problem. Here's an ideal column capital. Here's one of these thickened moments within the system, and this is one of those interior little brackets. I just love Brunelleschi. I love him for his struggle. I love him for his ingenuity. It seems like he would have been a pretty straightforward, pretty modest guy thinking all the time, but he's not comfortable with anything that he's seen wants to work it out on his own. Roughly at the same time, Brunelleschi gets a commission for the church of San Lorenzo, and San Lorenzo is the home church of the Medici family, so it's an important church. Brunelleschi uses this proportioning system that he thinks is pretty good. Can anybody look at the plan of the San Lorenzo church and try to identify a geometrical figure that probably Brunelleschi was working with? Thank you very much for saying square. Yes, square everywhere, right? In fact, the nave is a series of four squares. The crossing is a square. The apt is a square. The transept each consists of a square. And if you want to look at the proportioning of the aisles, the aisles are squares that are half the dimension of the nave square. So there's this arithmetic ratio of one to two going on throughout the plan of the church going on in the section of the church. So we have this one to two, one to four, and all of these kinds of techniques going on. And we also have a Latin cross plan, which is a plan that he would have seen during his visits to Rome. He would have seen it in the churches, the early Christian churches, like San Giovanni and Lateran. He would have been able to see the old St. Peter's church. It would have still been there. And of course, the Latin cross plan was used throughout the Gothic period. And Santa Croce are also Latin cross plans. But when he builds this, he's not interested in making a church that looks like Gothic interior. He's really trying to recover an interior space that's sympathetic with antique models. And so he looks at the early Christian church as a model for what he might do. It does illustrate to you the proportional system that he's using here, where the square is expanded upon and contracted to really organize almost everything within the building. There's a technique that you can find in every Brunelleschi church. Brunelleschi loves that square. And the square works not only in plan, but also in section. Another thing that Brunelleschi does, and here we can see this early Christian section that Brunelleschi has given us, of a flat ceiling and these walls with transparent colonnades on either side. He's really interested in articulating clearly what he's doing. And by articulation, I mean making visible to the whole. It's not sufficient to proportion this thing arithmetically with a one to two to four system of proportions, but he wants you to be able to read that. And he uses therefore this gray, warmish gray colored stone called Pietraserena, which means the serene stone. So any Brunelleschi church tends to be this kind of two-tone church of cream-colored stucco walls and gray Pietraserena. And when you look at this thing, the columns, or here, engaged in the wall, we have palasters. Palasters look like the order, but they're just flattened bands calling out the modules, making visible the proportions. Here in San Lorenzo, he's also using a gridded floor plan so that you can read the perspectival recession of the space very clearly in plan. But one thing to say about Brunelleschi, both in the Ospedale del Ginocenti and also in San Lorenzo, maybe more so in the Ospedale than in San Lorenzo, is that his idea of classical proportions is really a kind of super-delicate sensibility. Let's say there's a kind of gothic thinness going on in the way he uses these classical elements. It's so lacy and so delicate. And if you remember what Rome looked like, there was a serious wall going on. You can see that here too. The same idea about these nicely proportioned Corinthian columns, but boy, things are dematerialized and lacy for somebody who's trying to get back the lessons of antiquity. He's sort of not completely capable of discarding this gothic taste that he carries with him. This is just the articulation of the nave wall we can see over here. And here's the façade, which is sad. This is my new project for Bill Gates. I think he should stop working on world hunger and curing diseases and just spend money on building the façade of San Lorenzo. Wouldn't that be a good idea or is something wrong with me? The reason I would like him to build the façade of San Lorenzo is that Michelangelo did a perfectly good project for it. Wouldn't that be a good thing to build? Not that thing to go up there. So as you see it now, you have no idea what Brunelleschi's façade would be, but you see something about how façades would be applied to churches during the early Renaissance. And that is, there would be a rough stone surface with these kinds of grooves in it onto which a stucco could be applied or onto which stone fascia panels could be attached. When we looked at the plan of San Lorenzo, we saw this little thing in the corner over here, which has the same square bay as everything else. And that's another project by Brunelleschi. It's the old sacristy. And it's an interesting project for somebody like Brunelleschi because it's centralized. And if you really want to have this kind of geometrically driven microcosm of an architecture, the idea of a centralized plan will deliver that to you in a way that the longitudinal plan will not. This is pure geometry. So Brunelleschi really plays with the idea of how to realize this. And if you look at the section here, you can see here too he's not quite going with the Roman models. And I think partly it's because Brunelleschi was too good of an engineer to go with the Roman models. Once you figure out how to do the dome for the Florence Cathedral, you're never going to want to do one of those compression domes like the Pantheon dome because it's just too heavy and so he comes up with this kind of umbrella dome that folds in like this and comes down on ribs once again. But the round base of the dome sits on pendentives. So there's a real ingenious deploying of structural techniques not simply from Roman examples but also from Byzantine examples. And he might have gone to Ravenna and seen some of those, or at least known about them. Here's San Lorenzo. Here's the idea of the centralized plan. I show you here again the little Vitruvian man. And this is what the interior looks like. And again he's using the gray Pietra Serena to articulate the proportional systems and again it's this kind of riff on the square, both in plan and in section. But if you look at the details you see that this is so un-Roman even the banding of the Pietra Serena doesn't quite make it as Roman-ness. Over here where the plaster wraps the corner you think, yeah, that's pretty gutsy but then you get to these interior corners and it's the same problem that he had when he was doing the Osferali del Ginocenti which is, if you put the plaster there it takes up too much space and you break down the geometry of the bay. So he just has the tiniest little fragment of the plaster to call out the square module but it ends up giving him it looks kind of gothic in its thinness. And then he does this other thing and I don't know if you can see it very well here but he's trying to figure out how he can have visual weights of the plaster that you see in elevation and the plaster that wraps the corner. And so instead of saying full plaster full plaster where it would become too heavy visually because you basically see twice the amount of Pietra Serena he gives you pretty much three quarters one quarter which is crazy. And that ends up looking like a little colonette. This is a Brunelleschi church done a bit later in his career, Santo Spirito it looks really similar to San Lorenzo because it's another Latin cross church that's organized with a square module the proportioning systems of one to two to four that we saw in San Lorenzo are being deployed here too. Some of the things that he's doing that are a little bit different is he's working on making the proportions more robust and moving away from this super slender sensibility kind of gothicized sensibility and trying to get to a more chunky look doesn't do it very well but I'll tell you a technique to remember the difference between these. A lot of them the difference has to do with this perimeter that in San Lorenzo the perimeter bays are square and in Santo Spirito they're rounded so a technique is to think of these little rounded things as parts of S's Santo Spirito Santo Spirito the little bays are telling you the name of the church over and over and over again exactly the same stuff is going on here and I don't know if you can see the proportion as gutsy are here but the columns are thicker there's more chunky wall going on but some things are not happening like here there's a coffering in the ceiling that isn't quite as articulated as the coffering in San Lorenzo this is considered to be a masterpiece of church architecture by Bruno Leschi because it represents a more advanced moment in his career I think San Lorenzo was nicer because there's more struggle to it here's the facade once again the facade never got built Italy is full of these churches that never got a facade and here's the interior and so as a point of comparison you can look at San Lorenzo over here and Santo Spirito over here to get a sense of how that on many levels are similar can be differentiated look at the proportions of column to wall that we have here in San Lorenzo and how the amount of wall we have and the proportions of the columns change when we get to Santo Spirito and also the vaulting is different and also the paving is different lots of different things beautiful the old sacristy was Bruno Leschi's first attempt to build a centralized building there was no more chance to do that and that was a little chapel attached to the church of Santa Croce called the Pazzi Chapel you can see it here there's a bend in the paper right here so the geometry goes haywire this is a book and the Pazzi Chapel is right over here so here's Santa Croce here is a big square piazza Santa Croce and this is a kind of walled garden or cloister of a thing attached to the church let's point out something in the fabric of Florence that's typical of a lot of Italian cities and pretty interesting that is this moment does anybody have any ideas of what that moment could represent? yes there are roads coming in here and European space typically means you cut a line to wherever you want to go so there is this kind of incipient radial scheme cutting through the big oval figure here which is true the oval figure they did they just used the walls of a Roman amphitheater and filled it up with medieval housing and so you can still see even in the way these apartments are arranged over here there's kind of radial organization because they didn't put new walls in they just took the walls that were there and ran with it and at a certain point it was inconvenient to have this big lump here so they drove these roads through how the Pazzi chapel is situated here and I'm just going to digress a little bit of the Pazzi because the Pazzi were another rich banking family rivaling the Medici as the movers and shakers of Florence in the 1400s and so at a certain point the Pazzi decided that it would be politically clever to kill the sons of Cosimo di Medici Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano and they are in the truth of San Lorenzo no less and the Pazzi are kind of coming at them with swords and Giuliano and Lorenzo are fighting and finally Lorenzo escapes into the old sacristy but Giuliano is murdered by the Pazzi the Medici rally their forces they catch the Pazzi they kill them all and they hang them from the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio one of those spindly little medieval towers we've seen and they hang them there until the crows eat all their flesh and bones are carried away and in addition to remind people don't mess with the Medici very prudent lesson to learn but also the word Pazzo which is singular of Pazzi was prohibited for several hundred years the name was wiped out of the Italian language and even to this day in Italian Pazzo means crazy person so if you want to say that someone's crazy you call them Pazzo and a bunch of crazy people of course are the Pazzi but at this moment the Pazzi had not yet murdered Giuliano and things were okay here at the Pazzi Chapel there's something a little bit more complex going on in terms of the geometry we still have a centralized figure situated inside of a square a little Vitruvian diagram we still have a ribbed umbrella dome but we have a series of barrel vaults peeling off of this on one side of the barrel vaults is arithmetically related to the proportion of the central square and over here we have a place for the altar little apps over here which is another centralized figure, baby centralized figure so it's sort of fabulous this isn't exactly Brunelleschi's facade but it's close to what Brunelleschi's facade would have been maybe you can see it better here in the drawing there's an interest in a square so the same desire to make the section and the plan agree with the geometrical schemata also adheres to the desire to make the elevation play the same game and you can see these kinds of ornament that go on here that's really abstracted and flattened and rectilinear as if to call out certain proportions that you would see on the interior of all the Brunelleschi churches I think the Pazzi Chapel is the most perfect because it's so crisply articulated you can really see a tracing on the floor paving of the base spacing of the columns the palasters wrap up and become ribs in the ceiling plane and the whole thing becomes this kind of perfect little assemblage of pieces this drawing shows you the structure of the kind of dome he's using this umbrella dome it's the same corrugation principle we've seen before that the natural geometry of this fold which is kind of let's say like a cantaloupe maybe and we know he used turnips to design the duomo maybe he bought a cantaloupe and said that would make a good dome too this is the system for the dome that then gets covered over with this hemicyclical plaster shell but the ribs are called out and here's how the facade engages the courtyard in front of it and I think this is kind of cool the screen that negotiates between the wrapper of the little courtyard columnar wrapper slides behind it so that this big object pops out from the edge so it's simultaneously part of the edge and allows the continuity of the cloister to be developed but it also individuates itself as a special thing and you look at this and you think what's he thinking about, what kind of facade is that what is he trying to make you know he's so willing to play fast and loose with antiquity that he's never going to take something and just make it the way it was he has this too great a love for the spindly little delicate Gothic proportions but he's probably trying to do a triumphal arch he's probably thinking there is something in antiquity that has to do with a kind of rectilinear surface with a big central arch and some little arches here but in Brunelleschi's gothicized classicism this counts as a triumphal arch and on the interior there are lots of these really sweet little moments where things go haywire here too maybe you can see them slightly better here the same situation that we saw when we looked at the old sacristy of what happens to the plaster when you go into the little chancel bay you just have a tiny piece of it left and you have these tiny baby fingertips that come down to rest on it and similarly over here we have a little bit of the plaster folding in this direction so that we have a really nice deployment of a really clear articulation of the bays and then this little guy left over and this is just a cutaway drawing showing you how the dome is positioned inside the structure of the church this is something we looked at when we looked at gothic churches we got a timber superstructure from which the dome is hung same thing going on here next time we will talk we will talk about Leon Battista Alberti but not today