ABSTRACT
In or before 1413, Filippo Brunelleschi, like Gutenberg a master goldsmith, entered the cathedral in Florence, turned his back on its interior and, settling in the doorway, prepared to make a painting of Giotto's Baptistery in the piazza opposite. Filippo – bald, argumentative and unkempt – was the very model of an eccentric artist of the day: a multi-talented architect, engineer and scientist who scarcely bothered with drawing and painting except as design tools for other work. The church he was in, at this date, was still in part under construction. Within a few years, he was himself to design and build its dome. Some of the doors of the building he painted were also unfinished and Lorenzo Ghiberti, another goldsmith and Filippo's great rival, was labouring on the basreliefs to complete them. Brunelleschi's painting, now lost, was to be the first perspective image using a single vanishing point to be recorded in the history of Western art. It was followed almost immediately by further experiments along the same lines painted by Tommaso di Ser Giovanni de Mone, known as Masaccio, Hulking Tom. Masaccio's frescos in the churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Maria del Carmine contain such startling novelties as barrel-vaulted roofs and golden halos, seemingly floating in three dimensions.
