ABSTRACT
By the year 1400, Florence was the principal center of Renaissance culture in Italy. It was in the best position economically and intellectually to build on the innovations of the trecento, and artists who worked there produced a remarkable number of key monuments in the early decades of the new century. In 1401, as Florence was about to face a new attack by the Visconti, the Board of Works of the Baptistry announced a competition for a new pair of doors on the north side of the building. Bronze casting of large-scale sculpture in fifteenth-century Italy was by the lost-wax method, which had also been used in ancient Greece. Filippo Brunelleschi left the foundling hospital unfinished when he received the commission to design a dome for the cathedral. The history of Florence Cathedral can be seen as a metaphor for the dynamic but gradual transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in that city.
