page_title: History of Medieval Arabic and Western European domes
section_title: Tuscany
hierarchical_section_title: History of Medieval Arabic and Western European domes / Late Middle Ages / Kingdom of Italy in the Holy Roman Empire / Tuscany
caption_attribution_description: Piazza dei Miracoli, located in Pisa/Italy
context_page_description: The early domes of the Middle Ages, particularly in those areas recently under Byzantine control, were an extension of earlier Roman architecture. The domed church architecture of Italy from the sixth to the eighth centuries followed that of the Byzantine provinces and, although this influence diminishes under Charlemagne, it continued on in Venice, Southern Italy, and Sicily. Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel is a notable exception, being influenced by Byzantine models from Ravenna and Constantinople. The Dome of the Rock, an Umayyad Muslim religious shrine built in Jerusalem, was designed similarly to nearby Byzantine martyria and Christian churches. Domes were also built as part of Muslim palaces, throne halls, pavilions, and baths, and blended elements of both Byzantine and Persian architecture, using both pendentives and squinches. The origin of the crossed-arch dome type is debated, but the earliest known example is from the tenth century at the Great Mosque of Córdoba. In Egypt, a "keel" shaped dome profile was characteristic of Fatimid architecture. The use of squinches became widespread in the Islamic world by the tenth and eleventh centuries.
context_section_description: Exposed domes were common in Tuscany and a source of regional distinctiveness by the 1380s. The exposed outer dome of Pisa Baptistery was built over its earlier inner conical roof in the 14th century. If an external lantern tower was also removed from Pisa Cathedral in the 1300s, exposing the dome, one reason may have been to stay current with more recent projects in the region, such as the domed cathedrals of Siena and Florence.  Rapid progress on a radical expansion of Siena Cathedral, which would have involved replacing the existing dome with a larger one, was halted not long after the city was struck with an outbreak of the Black Death in 1348. Its dome was originally topped with a copper orb, similar to that over Pisa's dome today, but this was replaced in 1385 by a cupola surmounted by a smaller sphere and cross. 
  It was only a few years after the city of Siena had decided to abandon the massive expansion and redesign of their cathedral in 1355 that Florence decided to greatly expand theirs. A plan for the dome of Florence Cathedral was settled by 1357. However, in 1367 it was proposed to alter the church plan at the east end to increase the scale of the octagonal dome, widening it from 62 to 72 braccia, with the intent to further surpass the domes of Pisa and Siena, and this modified plan was ratified in 1368, under Master of Works Francesco Talenti. The construction guilds of Florence had sworn to adhere to the model of the dome created in 1367, with a "quinto acuto" pointed profile, but the scale of this new dome was so ambitious that experts for the Opera del Duomo, the board supervising the construction, expressed the opinion as early as 1394 that the dome could not be accomplished. Discussion in the fourteenth century revolved primarily around the cost of the project, and secondarily about the style. The enlarged dome would span the entire 42-metre (138 ft) width of the three aisled nave, just 2 meters less than that of the Roman Pantheon, the largest dome in the world. And because the distances between the angles of the octagon were even farther apart at 45.5 metres (149 ft), the average span of the dome would be marginally wider than that of the Pantheon. At 144 braccia, the height of the dome would evoke the holy number of the Heavenly Jerusalem mentioned in the Book of Revelation. By 1413, with the exception of one of the three apses, the east end of the church had been completed up to the windowed octagonal drum but the problem of building the huge dome did not yet have a solution. In 1417, with the drum completed, the master builder in charge of the project retired and a competition for plans to build the dome was begun in August 1418. 
  Brunelleschi's dome, designed in 1418, follows the height and form mandated in 1367. Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti were made joint leaders of the project to build the dome for Florence Cathedral in 1420. Brunelleschi's plan to use suspended scaffolding for the workers won out over alternatives such as building a provisional stone support column in the center of the crossing or filling the space with earth. The octagonal brick domical vault was built between 1420 and 1436, with Ghiberti resigning in 1433. The dome can be described as a cloister vault, with the eight ribs at the angles concentrating weight on the supporting piers. The dome is 42 meters wide and made of two shells. A stairway winds between them. Eight white stone external ribs mark the edges of the eight sides, next to the red tile roofing, and extend from the base of the dome to the base of the cupola. Each of the eight sides of the dome also conceal a pair of intermediate stone ribs that are connected to the main ribs by means of a series of masonry rings. A temporary wooden tension ring still exists near the bottom of the dome. Three horizontal chains of sandstone blocks notched together and reinforced with lead-coated iron cramps also extend the entire circumference of the dome: one at the base (where radial struts from this chain protrude to the exterior), one a third of the way up the dome
caption: The domes of Pisa Baptistery and Cathedral.
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