The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World - Hardcover

Paul Robert Walker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0380977877 ISBN 13: 9780380977871

Publisher: William Morrow, 2002

Synopsis

Joining the bestsellers Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, a lively and intriguing tale of two artists whose competitive spirit brought to life one of the world’s most magnificent structures and ignited the Renaissance

The dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore, the great cathedral of Florence, is among the most enduring symbols of the Renaissance, an equal to the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Its designer was Filippo Brunelleschi, a temperamental architect and inventor who rediscovered the techniques of mathematical perspective. Yet the completion of the dome was not Brunelleschi’s glory alone. He was forced to share the commission with his archrival, the canny and gifted sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti.

In this lush, imaginative history―a fascinating true story of artistic genius and personal triumph―Paul Robert Walker breathes life into these two talented, passionate artists and the competitive drive that united and dived them. As it illuminates fascinating individuals from Donatello and Masaccio to Cosimo de’Medici and Leon Battista Alberti, The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance offers a glorious tour of 15th-century Florence, a bustling city on the verge of greatness in a time of flourishing creativity, rivalry, and genius.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Robert Walker has written twenty books on subjects ranging from the Italian Renaissance and the American West to folklore, baseball, and miracles. A former teacher and journalist, he lives in Escondido, California, with his wife and two children.

From the Back Cover

The lively and intriguing tale of the competition between two artists, culminating in the construction of the Duomo in Florence, this is also the story of a city on the verge of greatness, and the dawn of the Renaissance, when everything artistic would change.

Florence's Duomo : the dome of the Santa Maria del Diore cathedral 埩s one of the most enduring symbols of the Italian Renaissance, an equal in influence and fame to Leonardo and Michaelangelo's works. It was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, the temperamental architect who rediscovered the techniques of mathematical perspective. He was the dome's ⨮ventor,⟷hose secret methods for building remain a mystery as compelling to architects as Fermat's Last Theorem once was to mathematicians. Yet Brunelleschi didn't direct the construction of the dome alone. He was forced to share the commission with his archrival, the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose ⏡radise Doors⟡re also masterworks. This is the story of these two men, a tale of artistic genius and individual triumph.

Reviews

Adult/High School-Drawing on a wealth of original source material and contemporary biographies, this engaging account introduces readers to rivals Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti, the young geniuses whose artistic visions were the beginnings of the Renaissance in Florence. Their lives and works are the main topics of this book, but Walker also interweaves the stories of other famous individuals such as Donatello and the Medicis. He frequently speculates on motivations and activities that might have taken place during undocumented years but reminds readers that he is only offering logical conjectures. He makes note of past events that impacted Florentine life of the day, such as the plague, the Great Schism, and the Guelf/Ghibelline struggle. Use of anecdotes, particularly the tale of an elaborate practical joke, shows the human side of these masters. Eighteen black-and-white photographs, some full page, some very small, show the major works discussed in the text. Extensive source notes are included.
Kathy Tewell, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Six hundred years ago, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi finished one and two in a contest to design the decorative bronze doors that now grace Florence's beloved Baptistry. Ghiberti, the youngest entrant, was the victor and subsequent recipient of many of the city's most sought-after projects. Wounded by his loss to the upstart Ghiberti, Brunelleschi (who was better educated and from a more respectable family than his rival) set out to reintroduce the glory of Antiquity in their age. Brunelleschi went on to design the dome that has long symbolized Florence's cityscape and succeeded in popularizing the return to the architectural vocabulary of Greece and Rome. Walker, author of various YA books and Every Day's a Miracle, contends (though too often he simply conjectures) that while fighting for architectural and sculptural commissions and fuming at one another, the two artists brought out the best in each other, their peers and subsequent generations. While that may be so, this book is hurt by the author's attempts to construct his imagined narrative without sufficient evidence to do so convincingly. Descriptions lacking originality and force (Brunelleschi's dome is "a vision of curving red tile and white marble perfection set against the pale blue Tuscan sky") and weak argumentation make this a disappointing popularization of the lives and work of two very talented men.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Walker, a prolific young adult and adult author, became fascianted with Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), and now offers his unique take on this world-altering genius and the engineering marvel that made him all but immortal, the dome of Florence's cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. Walker's main premise is that Brunelleschi was goaded to greatness by a long-standing feud with Lorenzo Ghiberti, who won the first of several competitions the two Florentine artists entered, that for the bronze baptistery "Paradise Doors." Walker also posits a more intimate relationship between Brunelleschi and his protege, Donatello, than is usually presumed. As intriguing as these speculations about a possible love affair and the politically complex, ill-willed, yet artistically fruitful rivalry between Filippo and Lorenzo are, they actually pale beside Walker's ardent explication of Brunelleschi's towering achievements: "the single most important artistic breakthrough of the Renaissance: the rediscovery of linear perspective," and his cosmological vision of art and architecture "as a means to define man's place in the universe and his relationship with God." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The author of 20 books on subjects ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the American West, Walker here pairs off proto-architect Filippo Brunelleschi and doormaker Lorenzo Ghiberti in an often engaging version of Quattrocento Smackdown. Pitting the two masters against each other in the competition for the sculpted bronze doors of the baptistery, Walker re-creates the intrigues of 15th-century Florence as the young, possibly illegitimate Ghiberti walks away with the lucrative commission and creates one of the Western world's great pieces of art. Spurred by his loss to Ghiberti, Brunelleschi goes on to greater fame and even greater fortune as the architect of the dome for Florence's cathedral (and rediscovers linear perspective in his spare time). Though Brunelleschi and Ghiberti share billing in the title, Walker is clearly more enamored of the former, and the bulk of the story is his. Using an estimable cache of documentary materials and a supporting cast that includes the sculptor Donatello and the painter Masaccio, Walker makes a fine circumstantial case for an artistic feud. Whether such a "feud" really existed will never be known. Recommended for public libraries and young adult collections.
Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0380977877
• ISBN 13: 9780380977871
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288