Brunelleschi's Dome Audio, Cassette – Unabridged, Audiobook Author: Visit Amazon's Ross King Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0736671803 | Format: PDF
Brunelleschi's Dome Audio, Cassette – Unabridged, Audiobook Description
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Audio Cassette
- Publisher: Books on Tape, Inc.; Unabridged edition (July 10, 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0736671803
- ISBN-13: 978-0736671804
- Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
The title of a non-fiction book should be a contract: here, the terms of Ross King's deal are, "I will tell you all you ever wanted to know about the great dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, and, as specified in the subtitle, I will leave you feeling you know how Brunelleschi 'reinvented architecture.'"
I enjoyed this book immensely, but King delivered on neither clause. I found myself puzzling over his technical explanations, rummaging through my library for a superior cutaway of the dome to better visualize his wordy exegesis. Oddly, each of the three well-known books I turned to - Murray's Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, Kostof's History of Architecture, and Hartt's History of Italian Renaissance Art - had precisely the same superb cutaway of the dome within a dome, showing Brunelleschi's Gothic vaulting underneath the classically inspired outer dome. "Mirabile dictu, so that's it!" This is only one of many instances where King created confusion where he might have parted the technical mists, with clearer text or with a better mating of text to illustration.
A corollary to this concern: for a book that has a fair number of illustrations, I found these, for the most part, woefully chosen. I appreciated the reproductions of period etchings and drawings, but these should have been supplemented with additional helps for the text. And at the very close, as a veritable punchline to the short book, King provides one small photograph of the dome in middle distance - no angles, no details, no close-up of the lantern, no full-page, no color. For readers who have neither been to Florence and seen the magnificent Santa Maria del Fiore in its urban context nor seen many illustrations or aspects of the dome, these are galling omissions.
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