More from John Kay’s Obliquity:
The Duomo
“The Florentine cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore was intended to have the largest dome of any modern building. The problems for over a century was that no one knew how to build it. According to Vasari in his Lives of the Painters, Brunelleschi won the commission to complete the structure by challenging his rivals to stand an egg upright on a piece of marble. After they all failed, he simply tapped the shell down on the marble and stood the egg on its broken end. He went on to crack the problem of constructing the dome When Brunelleschi’s rivals pointed out that anyone could have solved the egg problem in that way the architect replied that anyone could build his dome once they had seen his solution.”