Migrating Inventions. Brunelleschi’s Dome and the East

In 1971, the Italian conservator Piero Sanpaolesi presented an ambitious research hypothesis that challenged the canonic view of the Early Renaissance as shaped by a distinctly humanistic ingenuity, by contesting such a traditional Western-centered narrative at its very heart: Brunelleschi’s design for the dome of the Florentine cathedral. Sanpaolesi, in particular, addressed an outstanding comparison with the mausoleum of Oljaitü in Soltaniyeh, an Iranian domed building of the late 13th century, far in time and space, but surprisingly similar in its constructive technique and typology. After almost fifty years, the critical potential of this critical intuition still awaits to be unlocked and gains new credibility within a global and comparative approach, as the groundbreaking hypothesis for a study on the evolving history of domed structures along the Silk Road. Rather than proposing a study on the evolution of forms, this contribution builds on Sanpaolesi’s premise to pursue an architectural history of materials that aims to expand the traditional boundaries of the discipline by drawing attention to the circulation of technical knowledge. The uniqueness of Brunelleschi’s dome is, in fact, a material one: its technological innovation lies in the double-shell structure of self-supporting brickwork, which had no precedents in the Western context. Only in these terms, one can understand the outstanding familiarity of Santa Maria del Fiore with the tradition of Iranian brick-domes. Their affinity is a structural one, only vaguely mirrored by formal similarities. It is rather the material composition of Oljaitü’s mausoleum, built more than a century earlier, that speaks to a theory of the circulation of craftsmanship and building techniques in a global, early modern world that included both Europe and the Mongol Empire. Indeed, the evidence of continuous streams of communication that persisted between Florence and Iranian cities, such as Tabriz and Soltaniyeh, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth century, provides a scenario in which news and people traveled fast between the two nations, and oral communication played a major role. Within a broader Mediterranean context, this essay grounds for a new system of classification of medieval and early modern domed structures: one based on the process of making, and with a focus on material qualities and technical devices, inspired by the parallel between Brunelleschi’s dome and the mausoleum of Oljaitü, reshaping the traditional boundaries of the discipline and questioning its typological tools for a more inclusive understanding of the history of construction.