And the Idea Left the Hand

The Medici were buying their place in paradise; Bracciolini and Niccoli were drawing the manuscripts of Lucretius and Cicero back out of oblivion; and day after day people looked up at the invisible dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. The year is 1418, and we are in Florence. For more than half a century the cathedral had carried the promise of a dome that no one yet knew how to build. The model associated with Neri di Fioravanti had fixed its form: a vertiginous octagon, forty-five metres across, with no external buttresses.