Brunelleschi, Filippo, or Filippo di Ser Brunellesco (1377–1446), Italian architect and engineer, born in Florence, the son of a notary. He trained as a goldsmith and sculptor, and in 1401 he entered the competition for the bronze baptistery doors, which Ghiberti won. Brunelleschi came to architecture as a builder and construction engineer with an acute sense of practical issues and of the mathematics of natural optics; he was less interested than his successors (e.g. Alberti) in the revival of ancient Roman architecture. In or shortly before 1413, Brunelleschi invented a method of giving a naturalistic impression of depth in flat pictures and made two paintings of city views (the first showed the baptistery and the second the Palazzo Vecchio) to demonstrate how well the method worked; it is not known what the method was. See perspective.
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