Free Brunelleschis Dome by Ross King

mallets, all of which could be repaired or sharpened by a blacksmith who operated a forge on the site. Upon arriving at the cathedral, the men had their names inscribed on a gesso board, rather like punching a clock in a factory, while the working hours were recorded by a sand hourglass. Filippo appears to have been a strict master. Later he would institute an even more precise form of discipline on the building site of Santo Spirito, where an oriuolo di mezz’oro , a half-hour clock, regulated the working day by chiming every thirty minutes. The conception of time was changing in the fifteenth century. Throughout the Middle Ages it had been associated with the liturgical hours. The Latin word hora , “hour,” was in fact synonymous with prayer. Each of these hours had been divided into four parts of ten minutes’ duration, while each minute was divided into forty “moments.” By 1400, however, it had become the custom to divide the hour into sixty minutes, and each minute into sixty seconds. The pace of life was increasing. 2
    Besides their tools, the men also carried their food with them in leather pouches. The noon meal, the comesto , was taken at eleven o’clock, when the church bells sounded a second time. We know that the comesto was normally eaten aloft because in 1426, in order to foil idlers, the Opera decreed that no mason could descend from the dome during the day. This must have meant that even on the hottest summer days the workers did not enjoy their dolce far niente , “sweet idleness,” the afternoon siesta when all labors would usually cease because of the scorching temperatures. It was also in 1426 that, on Filippo’s orders, a cookshop was installed between the two shells of the cupola in order to serve a noon meal to the workers. The dangers of an open fire on the dome were possibly mitigated by the fact that the masons also served as Florence’s firemen. This responsibility fell to them because they owned the tools used to combat fires in the only way that was practical: tearing down walls to create firebreaks.
    To slake their thirst on sweltering summer days the workers drank wine, which they carried in flasks along with their tools and lunches. Strange and inadvisable as a draft of wine might seem under these circumstances, whether diluted or not, wine was a healthier drink than water, which carried bacteria and therefore disease. And the Florentines placed great faith in the wholesome properties of wine. Drunk in moderation, it was said to improve the blood, hasten digestion, calm the intellect, enliven the spirit, and expel wind. It might also have given a fillip of courage to men clinging to an inward-curving vault several hundred feet above the ground.
    The stonemasons eating their breakfast on the tambour that historic August morning would have needed a good deal of courage. Below them they could see the newly completed vault of the south tribune, where just three weeks earlier a stonemason named Donato di Valentino had fallen a hundred feet to his death. Another man had also died in the rush to finish the tribune so that work on the dome could begin in the summer. The Opera had paid for both funerals, but this was the extent of the charity that the men could expect. Anyone injured on the job would face a grim future, as would his family, because neither the Opera nor the Masons Guild made provisions for either disabled workers or the widows and children of dead ones. The only social obligation of the members of the Masons Guild was attendance at one another’s funerals.
    Present in the minds of the stonemasons must also have been the awesome and abiding fact that none of them yet knew whether the structure could actually be erected according to Filippo’s plan. Certain details of the cupola’s design had been established, of course, in the twelvepoint building program adopted the previous month. The width of the inner dome, for example, was to taper like that of the Pantheon,