August 29, 2018 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti
From that moment on (after having taken
part in a competition in 1401 in Florence that largely relied on one’s artistic
and architectural sense) Filippo Brunelleschi knew he had found his true
calling.
Architect is a profession where many arts
and crafts and knowledge converges such as geometry, trigonometry, engineering,
art, metallurgy, physics and that nebulous humanism.
Humanism in the Renaissance architect
refers to apotheosizing the art of ancient Greeks and Romans of classical
antiquity.
This was in contrast to the previous Medieval
period or the Middle Ages (the interim period in Europe that existed after the
fall of the Roman Empire and beginning of Renaissance) where art was less like
real-life and more formal (perhaps because life for ordinary apes was harsh
marked by famines, black death, mass migrations and dislocations and a climate
change from Medieval Warm Period to Little Ice Age along with serfdom and anti-Semitism
remaining widely prevalent all over Europe).
While Brunelleschi was commissioned for
several buildings (his first one was ‘Hospital of the Innocents’ – a children’s
orphanage) he is most well known for the Florence Cathedral or the Cathedral of
Saint Mary of the flower.
The building of the Cathedral was designed
in the previous century under the supervision of multiple architects and the
work on the dome started only in 1420; the first stone of the cathedral was
laid way back on 1296.
So to me more accurate, Brunelleschi was
commissioned to complete the dome of this cathedral whose base or the body was
already built but the challenge was that it had to be even larger and more
grandiose than the Roman Pantheon.
Again, Brunelleschi won the contract not through
bribery or corruption but through a fair competition against another great Florentine
artist and architect Lorenzo Ghiberti who eventually went on to create the
pairs of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery.
Michelangelo was so impressed by the work
that he called them the “Gates of Paradise” or in the language of Michelangelo “Porte
del Paradiso”.
It lame literal sense to name it so as the
Gates of Paradise had 10 panels in them with one biblical story in each of them
starting from the story of Adam and Eve to the story of the King Solomon
showing how wisely he adjudicated the dispute between two prostitutes who had
approached him with one live baby and one dead baby.
The construction of the cathedral’s dome,
lantern and the exedra went on to occupy most of the life of Brunelleschi
(consuming almost thirty long years).
The construction of the dome, as is
believed by the experts, was not a task for the average architect of those
times and it took both the architectural and mathematical genius of
Brunelleschi to bring the arduous task to fruition.
Great as the work of the dome of the Florence
Chapel, we for our story are more concerned with Brunelleschi’s experiment on
linear perspective.
So what was it that Brunelleschi did that
the artist before him did not?
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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