Orcagna, whose tabernacle we shall see at Or San Michele. And
so the work went on until the main structure was complete in the
thirteen-seventies.

Another longish interval then came, in which nothing of note in the
construction occurred, and the next interesting date is 1418, when a
competition for the design for the dome was announced, the work to
be given eventually to one Filippo Brunelleschi, then an ambitious
and nervously determined man, well known in Florence as an architect,
of forty-one. Brunelleschi, who, again according to Vasari, was small,
and therefore as different as may be from the figure which is seated
on the clergy house opposite the south door of the cathedral, watching
his handiwork, was born in 1377, the son of a well-to-do Florentine of
good family who wished to make him a notary. The boy, however, wanted
to be an artist, and was therefore placed with a goldsmith, which was
in those days the natural course. As a youth he attempted everything,
being of a pertinacious and inquiring mind, and he was also a great
debater and student of Dante; and, taking to sculpture, he was one
of those who, as we shall see in a later chapter, competed for the
commission for the Baptistery gates. It was indeed his failure in that
competition which decided him to concentrate on architecture. That
he was a fine sculptor his competitive design, now preserved in the
Bargello, and his Christ crucified in S. Maria Novella, prove; but
in leading him to architecture the stars undoubtedly did rightly.

It was in 1403 that the decision giving Ghiberti the Baptistery
commission was made, when Brunelleschi was twenty-six and Donatello,
destined to be his life-long friend, was seventeen; and when
Brunelleschi decided to go to Rome for the study of his new branch of
industry, architecture, Donatello went too. There they worked together,
copying and measuring everything of beauty, Brunelleschi having always
before his mind the problem of how to place a dome upon the cathedral
of his native city. But, having a shrewd knowledge of human nature
and immense patience, he did not hasten to urge upon the authorities
his claims as the heaven-born architect, but contented himself with
smaller works, and even assisted his rival Ghiberti with his gates,
joining at that task Donatello and Luca della Robbia, and giving
lessons in perspective to a youth who was to do more than any man
after Giotto to assure the great days of painting and beco