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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Fernando Fuga and the Albergo dei Poveri
While Vanvitelli developed the worldly Caserta, to Ferdinando Fuga
fell a more mundane but no less instrumental element of Bourbon
rule: the Albergo dei Poveri in Naples. Born a Florentine, Fuga came
to Rome to study at the Accademia di San Luca. He had proposed a
project for the Lateran facade as early as 1722 and participated in the
Trevi competition as well. His fortunes brightened when the
Florentine pope Clement XII made him architect of the papal
palaces.
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Nicola Salvi and the Trevi Fountain
Alongside serious official architectural works on major ecclesiastical
sites, eighteenth-century Rome also sustained a flourishing activity in
more lighthearted but no less meaningful works.The Trevi Fountain
ranks perhaps as the most joyous site in Rome. Built from 1732 to
1762 under the patronage of popes Clement XII, Benedict XIV, and
Clement XIII, the great scenographic water display is often described
as the glorious capstone of the baroque era.This is indeed where
most architectural histories (and tourist itineraries) of Italian
architecture end. It is one of those places, like the Pantheon, where
the entire sweep of Rome’s culture can be read.
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The pantheon revisited
The Pantheon is one of the most celebrated and most carefully
studied buildings of Western architecture. In the modern age, as it
had been in the Renaissance, the Pantheon is a crucible of critical
thinking. Preservation of the Pantheon had been undertaken in the
seventeenth century and continued in the eighteenth during the
pontificate of Clement XI.
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While Vanvitelli developed the worldly Caserta, to Ferdinando Fuga
