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cathedral. The tambour, or drum, had been constructed between 1410 and 1413, with walls fourteen feet thick in order to support the weight of the cupola. In 1413 a large new crane had been built to raise materials, and two of the three tribunes of the octagon had been vaulted. The church had also just acquired its new name, Santa Maria del Fiore, “Our Lady of the Flower,” having previously been referred to as Santa Reparata, the name of the older cathedral, which was now completely demolished.
    Now in middle age, Filippo was short, bald, and pugnacious looking, with an aquiline nose, thin lips, and a weak chin. His appearance was not helped by his dirty and disheveled clothing. Yet in Florence such an unsightly display was almost a badge of genius, and Filippo was simply the latest in a long and illustrious line of ugly or unkempt artists. The name of the painter Cimabue means “ox head,” and Giotto was so unattractive that Giovanni Boccaccio devoted a tale to his appearance in the Decameron , marveling at how “Nature has frequently planted astonishing genius in men of monstrously ugly appearance.” Later, Michelangelo would become legendary for his ugliness, which was partly the result of a broken nose earned in a fracas with the sculptor Pietro Torrigiani. And like both Giotto and Filippo, Michelangelo was indifferent to the state of his dress, often going for months on end without changing his dogskin breeches. In the end, ugly and eccentric artists would become so much the norm that Filippo’s biographer, the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari — himself an uncouth man, with a skin disease and dirty, uncut fingernails — marveled that an artist as talented as Raphael should actually have been physically handsome.
    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Filippo was unmarried. But although in Florence bachelorhood was not unusual for a man in his forties, since men married late and generally took much younger women as their brides, Filippo would never marry, and in this abstention from family life he also became part of a long and glorious tradition of artists that included Donatello, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo. Many Florentine artists and thinkers took a dim view of both marriage and women. Boccaccio, who never married, criticized Dante for having done so, claiming that a wife was a hindrance to study.
    No sooner was he settled in Florence than Filippo took steps to become involved in the cupola project. In May 1417 the Opera del Duomo paid him 10 florins for drawing plans of the dome on parchment. What these plans showed is not recorded, but Manetti reports that Filippo’s advice had been eagerly sought by the wardens after his return from Rome. That he should have insinuated his way into the heart of such an important project at this stage is possibly surprising, regardless of his growing reputation as a student of Roman vaulting techniques. Despite his youthful promise as a metalworker he had, at the age of forty-one, accomplished relatively little in practical terms. In 1412 he had given advice on the construction of the cathedral in the nearby town of Prato, but the work being done there was decorative rather than structural, entailing the encrustation of the church’s facade with the dark green stone known as serpentine. And so far he had failed to receive a single architectural commission except for a house near the Mercato Vecchio that he had built for his kinsman Apollonio Lapi.
    By 1418 Filippo was probably best known for an experiment in linear perspective. This experiment must have been conducted in or before 1413, when Domenico da Prato refers to him as “the perspective expert, ingenious man, Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, remarkable for skill and fame.” It was one of the first of Filippo’s many innovations and a landmark in the history of painting.
    Perspective is the method of representing three-dimensional objects in recession on a two-dimensional surface in order to give the same