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0:01
NARRATOR: After the dark ages, Italy lit up the world. It emerged from the devastating cloud of the Black Death and brought innovation, spectacle, and the glorification of man. It was an explosion of new ideas from some of the greatest minds of all time. Filippo Brunelleschi was the ingenio, the ingenious man. NARRATOR: It produced some of the greatest works of architecture, art, and engineering the world has ever known. The enterprise of Renaissance engineering
0:39
is recovering this ancient knowledge. I don't think that any other period in the history of western civilization can brag to having produced so much genius.
0:52
as builders battled unprecedented natural disaster, church dogma, and each other. The Italian Peninsula becomes the cockpit, the fighting point. NARRATOR: This was the age of architects, and it created a bold new sense that nothing was impossible. [theme music]
1:29
476 AD, the great Roman Empire has collapsed ending its period of domination.
1:41
The emperors who ruled and shaped the region have been dissolved and Western Europe has become fractured. For centuries, Europe is dominated by a line of German kings who call their domain the Holy Roman Empire.
1:58
But by the 12th century, a loose collection of Italian republics is taking shape. Together they aim to recover the past glory of Rome.
2:12
They would revitalize Europe and engineer the blueprint for the modern Western world.
2:22
Hi, I'm Peter Weller, and in 2001 I came here to the city of Florence to finish a master's degree in Italian Renaissance art history at Syracuse University in Florence. The Italian Renaissance is as overwhelmingly mind-blowing as it is beautiful. It is the most impacting epic of the last Millennium. It is the age of invention with Da Vinci and Copernicus and Gutenberg, but it is also the age of the cult of personality. It is the time when that unknown artisan or craftsman will become the artist.
2:54
It is the time when that nameless builder will become the architect.
3:01
In the 12th and 13th centuries, Italy is really beginning this sort of rebirth because what's happening is that stability has been re-instituted onto the Peninsula mainly through the Holy Roman Empire. Through the system that
3:21
NARRATOR: Within these newly liberated Italian cities, a new kind of leader emerged. The rulers of the Italian city-states are the merchants. They're not the traditional aristocracy. They're not the traditional nobles. And this produces this extraordinarily vibrant urban life in the 13th century. NARRATOR: Families like the Medici went from running banks and businesses to running cities.
3:59
Wealth bought power, and power could buy art and architecture. These once small towns soon began to build on a massive scale always with an eye at outdoing their neighbors and maintaining independence.
4:20
NICHOLAS ADAMS: The foundation for the Renaissance is the city.
4:24
from art, architecture, engineering, literature, all the things that go on depend upon the city. NARRATOR: One ambitious city seeking power in this new age was a growing republic situated along an important trade route between France and Rome. Its name was Siena. I come here to the Piazza del Campo once a year to witness that medieval harangue on horseback around here called Palio, three times around this Campo, 90 seconds of speed and violence on bareback horses.
5:00
When the horses run, they pass this magnificent 15th century sculpted fountain called the Fonta Gaia by Jacopo della Quercia. Now, today, when we turn on a tap we just take it for granted that H2O is going to come out. But the Sienese needed this fountain because when they were making all this loot, prosperity begets a city jam packed with people, and more people demands, as we have seen with Persia, with Carthage, with Rome, with the Maya, more water.
5:32
NARRATOR: But providing sufficient water for this city would prove to be a massive challenge. MICHELE CAMPININI: Siena doesn't have a river very close, so they had to find this water somewhere else. They thought they could find another way to go and search for water, and that way was building some tunnels underground. NARRATOR: By digging a network of underground tunnels called bottini, the workers could tap into small natural springs and groundwater that surrounded Siena.
6:07
Slowly the water would seep through the terrain into these narrow tunnels and holding tanks. But excavating these bottini was no easy task.
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Workers used shovels, picks, and chisels to chip away at the calcite deposits in the tunnel, working in dark dusty, conditions often no more than a few feet high.
6:40
A bottino like this one would sometimes run for miles and miles so the engineers had to know just where in the heck they were going. So every so often they dug a hole up to the surface, and these holes were called "occhi," or eyes. It would give the engineer a sense of where the direction of the bottino would be, and if they were wrong, they could redirect the bottino. NARRATOR: The water would navigate through the barrel-shaped tunnels, turning into different parts of the city
7:08
where it was needed most and coursing underneath the busy streets into the fountains around Siena, like the Fonta Gaia. Now, these channels had to be pitched at an angle ever so slight, imperceptible to the naked eye, less than one Because if the water fl degree. it would overwhelm the system. So to keep this from happening, the engineers used an instrument called an archipendolo. It's nothing but a pendulum. It's a stick with a string and a weighted ball or stone at the end.
7:42
the string will always remain vertical, giving you a vertical line in relationship to the tilt of the horizontal stick. In this way, the water would flow quietly and evenly into Siena and fill up the Fonta Gaia. NARRATOR: By the year 1345, more than 10 miles of tunnels were functioning underneath bustling Siena. As a result, Siena continued to grow and prosper. More water brought more people to the boomtown. More people to the boomtown, more turf is needed.
8:15
Pretty soon, Siena controls most of Southern Tuscany. Now, this prosperity and this land encroachment, if you will, would seriously become the burr in the saddle to one of its neighbors.
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Florence and Siena are the two dominant republics in Tuscany. It was a rivalry on all levels. Economic political, artistically. And in the 13th century, the city-state of Siena in all three of these categories was probably Florence's superior. NARRATOR: The two republics would go head to head until Siena delivered a crushing blow at the Battle of Montaperti in 1260. Siena fights Florence. And to put it bluntly, Siena kicks ass. Florence goes home in humiliation and defeat. But guess what?
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That ain't going to be for long. NARRATOR: The hydraulic engineering that made Siena the place to be couldn't sustain it through one of the greatest natural disasters the world had ever seen. 1347, the Black Death struck. And according to the eminent humanist writer Giovanni Boccaccio who witnessed the Black Death, the disease killed so fast that you could lunch with your friends and dine with your ancestors in heaven. One conservative estimate is that Siena
9:42
lost over 60% of its population in a matter of months. One thing is for certain, after the Black Death, Siena would never be a major player again on the stage of early modern Italy. That singular event probably marks the end of Siena's role on a kind of international scene, and it also marks the beginning of Florence's rise to power. NARRATOR: The city of Siena was shattered. It would leave the door wide open for its arch rival, Florence, to step into the void and engineer its own rise
10:17
to power and glory, culminating in one of the most magnificent monuments of the modern era, a structure no one thought could ever be built. Siena's bottini system was functioning as the city's primary water source until 1914.
10:42
[music playing] NARRATOR: In the 13th and 14th centuries, cities are the power centers of Italy. But Florence is in a class by itself. The ruling elite is thriving with money to burn. Man and his unlimited potential are taking center stage. It's a revolutionary idea called humanism. Humanism quite simply is an interest in the ancient world.
11:13
In Italy, all you had to do is look around at the ancient ruins and understand how great man had been in the ancient world. It was all there. If we could imitate that building, if we could take the principles of that building and apply it to our buildings, then we'd have something really remarkable. NARRATOR: But when the Black Death struck Europe in 1347, Florence was not immune. Practically half the city's population was wiped out. It would take the region more than half a century to recover,
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but it would be a recovery like no other the world had ever seen. It was called the Renaissance, which means literally rebirth or revival. Throughout Tuscany, an elite patron class of super rich families would wield their private fortunes to commission magnificent projects to work for the people. There is an appetite among those who survive to enjoy life, to do other things, to understand or to sense that life is to be exploited in some way for those who are alive.
12:33
NARRATOR: The Medicis of Florence, one of the wealthiest families in Italy, would lead the way in regaining the glory that had been Rome, restoring it in Florence, and transforming the city into the new Athens. The structure of patronage has changed. Patrons are using artists and architects to celebrate themselves.
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NARRATOR: The centerpiece of this effort would be the cathedral in the heart of Florence. They've never seen a structure that looks like the one they want to build, right? That's a matter of ambition, of idea.
13:17
See that big old church behind me with that scaffolding on it? It's called Santa Maria Del Fiore, otherwise known as the Duomo or cathedral of Florence. It was built by a guy named Arnolfo di Cambio around 1200s. But you know what? He was dead before it was ever finished. Arnolfo intended for the church to have a dome, but he's dead so the church stands for a whole bunch of decades without any dome on it at all. Finally, in the 1400s, it's left up
13:47
to a guy wearing a real genius suit named Filippo Brunelleschi to not only change the entire idea of building to become an architect, but to make the entire field of architecture a design.
14:06
NARRATOR: Brunelleschi had grown up in a middle class family and was expected to become a government bureaucrat like his father. But Brunelleschi was interested in the art of design and first became a master goldsmith. It's only in his early 30s that he then moved over and began to become what we now call an architect. Brunelleschi is a maverick and he's brash. His dad is a notary. Brunelleschi wants to study sculpture. Wonder how his dad reacted to that one, huh?
14:38
Probably like my old man reacted when I told him I wanted to go to New York and become an actor. In any case, by his early 20s, Brunelleschi is a pretty fair goldsmith. Now, in 1401, the baptistery decides it wants to replace its doors. So they hold a competition. Competition comes down to two guys, Brunelleschi and the international Gothic man of the hour Lorenzo Ghiberti. Brunelleschi was pretty good, but he ain't no Ghiberti. Ghiberti wins.
15:08
Brunelleschi runs away with his tail between his legs humiliated in defeat. He loses the competition to Ghiberti in 1401. And it sets up the kind of perfect opportunity for him to leave the city of Florence and then go to Rome and study the secrets of the ancients.
15:28
NARRATOR: Brunelleschi may have spent nearly two decades studying in Rome, examining the most important structures of great Roman engineering. Renaissance Italians are fascinated with the way Romans did everything, the way things were done in ancient Rome, and building is no exception. A big part of the enterprise of Renaissance engineering is recovering this ancient knowledge. NARRATOR: One structure in particular may have had a lasting impression on the young Brunelleschi, the Pantheon.
16:03
Had the Romans found a way to build it without complex wooden scaffolding supporting it?
16:09
Over those two painstaking decades, he may have examined every inch of that dome, which spanned 142 feet, struggling to unlock the secrets of its construction. When Brunelleschi returned to Florence, he could have brought with him the secrets of Roman dome construction. It seems that Brunelleschi reappears in Florence just at the time that the opera of the cathedral was in fact planning on this competition for the design of the dome.
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The cathedral was to be, upon completion, the largest church in all of Christianity.
16:57
NARRATOR: It would be one of the greatest construction challenges Italy had ever seen. They were building it large to sort of show the world exactly how important this city was on all levels. The problem was is that they were setting themselves up for a big fall. NARRATOR: Unlike the other architects, Brunelleschi boldly proposed a method that would earn him ridicule. He designed a dome without the traditional use of flying buttresses, wooden supports, and internal scaffolding.
17:27
General public opinion was that Brunelleschi had gone very simply mad. They also began to realize that no one else seems to have any clearer picture of how to pull this thing off, and so they begin gradually to sort of heed his words. NARRATOR: Brunelleschi managed to win over the judges with his unique design. But much to his dismay, the commission would come with one infuriating stipulation. Seems that fate would rear its ugly head because he would have
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to share that role with his nemesis Lorenzo Ghiberti. NARRATOR: With many convinced his design would never work, Brunelleschi would not only have to design his great dome, he would have to engineer his rivals defeat as well.
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On August 7th, 1420, with Brunelleschi hovering over every detail, construction of the great dome finally began. What Brunelleschi decides to do is to construct not one dome but two. A dome within a dome. NARRATOR: When standing inside the cathedral, people would be able to take in the beautifully decorated internal dome. But from the outside, the second dome would have a more functional purpose.
18:42
He would use that second shell to protect the inner dome from rain but at the same time to make the entire structure look more [speaking italian] more swollen and magnificent. NARRATOR: To give the shells a structural foundation, marble ribs would be installed for every angle of the octagonal dome. Then rows of arches would be built to intersect the ribs at 90 degree angles. But Brunelleschi faced one enormous logistical problem, finding a way to lift several tons of material
19:18
up to heights of more than 200 feet.
19:24
And so Brunelleschi devises something we call the ox-hoist. NARRATOR: Oxen yoked to a tiller turned a vertical shaft to raise or lower the hoist. The stroke of genius was a screw that changed gears from forward to reverse and the direction from up or down. This meant the oxen didn't need to be taken out of the harness and spun around. They could keep walking in the same direction to both raise and lower the hoist, a saving of literally hours every day.
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By the end of the project, it would lift an estimated 70 million pounds. But the material that had been so carefully lifted still had to be moved laterally and then perfectly placed hundreds of feet in the air. To accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, Brunelleschi designed a second entirely new kind of hoist called a Castello. The Castello was a crane that they used to move weights horizontally. NARRATOR: Perched high on the cupola and resembling a gallows, it used a cross beam
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and counterweight system, allowing builders to place material with millimetrical precision. These are the machines that he was introducing, and these are the machines that made it possible for such a dome to have been built. NARRATOR: But all of this creative thinking still didn't solve the fundamental challenge of constructing such an expansive dome with no internal support. Brunelleschi would still need to figure out how to prevent it from collapsing. It would demand his greatest leap
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of imagination yet combined with a lot of hard core calculation.
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Brunelleschi was granted the first modern patent for his invention of a river transport vessel.
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[music playing]
21:30
NARRATOR: 1420, Florence, Italy. The visionary architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi has been commissioned to construct the most magnificent dome in the world, the cupola at Santa Maria del Fiore.
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But first he will need to prevent it from crumbling to the ground without supports. Now, it's one thing to invent a clutch and a flywheel and you got the donkey only going in one direction. Saves a lot of time. And then you invent a crane. It brings the stuff up high. But the more important question is, I'm standing on top of this dome, and how did Brunelleschi keep this sucker from caving in? NARRATOR: He would have to find a way to keep the bricks in place and support the bed
22:18
joints of the masonry. The solution? An ingenious bricklaying technique that relied on careful angles, placement, and friction. Brunelleschi comes up with this invention, if you will, from Rome, which they use decoratively, but we don't know that they used it functionally, of herringbone bricks. You have a short brick here that's sort of bookended by two long bricks, and subsequently you have weight coming down and weight coming down and then weight coming across
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and then weight coming down and then weight coming across. The whole point of this is that a herringbone pattern will displace the weight out and down instead of just directly down where you might have collapse of your dome. NARRATOR: To solve the opposite problem of bricks bursting outward, Brunelleschi laid a set of chains horizontally around the octagonal circumference of the dome. They were going to construct these so-called catene, or these horizontal chains that were intended to maintain
23:19
the hoop stress or the lateral thrust of the dome. NARRATOR: Five chains were to be interlocked at regular intervals to support the dome and serve as invisible buttressing.
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All this time, Brunelleschi was forced to supervise the project with his co-engineer and rival Ghiberti. Now with material for the placement of the chains pouring in, he would seize the opportunity to move Ghiberti out.
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In August of 1423, Brunelleschi called in sick. Ghiberti rather reluctantly then begins the direction of the placement of these wooden chains. And as soon as Brunelleschi heard that the process had begun, he miraculously recovers, inspects the quality of Ghiberti's work, and criticizes it publicly saying they would have to undo everything he had done. NARRATOR: With Ghiberti sufficiently humiliated, Brunelleschi was declared the head of the project for life.
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On August 30th, 1436, after 16 years of construction, the largest masonry dome in the world was completed. But Brunelleschi's career was far from over. Even before the completion of the Duomo, he had been experimenting with perspective and mathematical proportions. Although his structures appeared simple and straightforward in design, there were spatial games being played with the lines of buildings, and one of Brunelleschi's greatest innovations was a concept that is still
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a cornerstone of engineering today, single point perspective.
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By looking at this eight-sided baptistery and the other buildings surrounding it, Brunelleschi realized if he placed three-dimensional buildings on a two-dimensional plane, they would disappear at a finite point called the vanishing point. This idea that the apparent size of an object would decrease with increasing distance from the eye would transform the entire landscape for artists and architects around the world, allowing the concept of the blueprint to emerge.
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What it does in architecture is change the game all the way through Frank Lloyd Wright and to Frank Gehry today because architecture is no more just building. It isn't figuring it out in the dirt and saying, hey, if this wall is that long, we've got to make the spire that high. Now they can deduce it and put it on paper. It's no longer the builders in control. It's the architect. Before Brunelleschi, most projects were based on approximate models.
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This would come to an end when Brunelleschi began this practice of what we call paper architecture and that is clearly indicating what his plans were and then begins the sort of modern tradition of architecture today. NARRATOR: Brunelleschi's radical new designs would be put to the test in 1442 in his construction of the Pazzi Chapel. Now, this building behind me is the chapter house for the Church of Santa Croce, a Franciscan church. It's called the Pazzi Chapel.
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I'm going to talk to a man I'm a little nervous talking to. He's one of my own professors from Syracuse University, Dr. Rob Hatfield, and he's going to explain why this chapel is distinct from what Brunelleschi was doing before this. Let's go look on the inside. Let's go see them.
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It's all about relationships, and he's trying to figure out an arrangement of all of these pieces so they all fit together perfectly just the way the bones all fit together in your body. Your Renaissance architect, thanks to the invention of scientific perspective where they learn how to represent space, and it's Brunelleschi who invents this, learned to see things in 3D, learned to imagine things in 3D. So rather than flying by the seat of your pants,
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you start with the concept and you follow the concept to its fruition and perfection. And I think you get a very good sense of that. I mean, that's spatial magic. NARRATOR: Brunelleschi's innovations in design and construction techniques would be emulated by architects for centuries, but a new era was dawning in the age of architects. Neighboring powers rekindled old rivalries, and artists who had turned into architects and engineers would now be drafted into a new kind of public service.
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Now they turn their creative thinking to the art of war.
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Brunelleschi used more than four million bricks in the construction of the dome.
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[music playing] NARRATOR: 1459, Filippo Brunelleschi has become the father of Renaissance architecture making Florence a Mecca for innovations in design and construction. Now his methods and ideas spread beyond his Republic as architects throughout the region would launch ambitious building campaigns. Filippo Brunelleschi transforms all of architectural design by using Roman elements like this column and pilasters and numerical proportions integrating them into an elegant and beautiful hole that
29:16
is never overwhelmed by one of the parts. But he doesn't write it down. It's up to a young guy in the next generation, Leon Battista Alberti. This guy did everything. He wrote about architecture, archaeology, political science, He even wrote about religion. He's a pretty good designer and architect himself. Now everyone starts to read about Alberti, including a very powerful guy at the moment, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. I love that name Aeneas Silvius.
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So for all you guys out there like me having a little bit of a heart attack because your wife just said, honey, let's redecorate, get a load of this. Pius reads Alberti and says, you know, I'd like to do that little Roman thing for the place where I was born. What, the house? No, the whole town!
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NARRATOR: Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini became Pope Pius II in 1458. By 1459, he had turned his attention to his hometown of Corsignano and commissioned a first attempt at constructing an ideal city.
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This is the Tuscan town of Pienza, and this is my friend and a guy who taught me, Rocky Ruggiero from Syracuse University. I want to ask you first, is this the first real Renaissance town that's planned as such? To come to this backwater town where, you know, population is a couple of hundred people, it kind of gives Pius free reign. So what he does is to create this rather imposing cathedral. And it's that first impression that you get. And then around this particular structure,
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he will organize all of the other various archetypes. If this Piazza is so perfectly planned with its perfect bishops palace and it's cathedral, why are these streets always crooked? I come up here, I don't know where I'm going. ROCKY RUGGIERO: This is actually done intentionally. One thing they didn't want to do was to let people know how small it was, and so they intentionally keep these streets from forming a direct access so that you always have a corner that's sort of obstructing your view,
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and it makes it seem much larger than it actually is. NARRATOR: By the time the transformation was complete in 1464, more than 40 buildings had been constructed or refurbished. Each on its own was an important expression of revolutionary ideals, but it was the town as a whole that represented everything the age stood for. And yet, the harmonious feeling in Pienza would not last long. The radical new ideals that glorified man and human potential were being challenged.
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Here is 1492. Not only has Columbus discovered America, but Lorenzo the Magnificent de Medici, the great patron of the arts in Florence, is dead. But a lot of Florence is sick of the Medicis and their cronies. I mean, they want the Medici kids run out of town. Plus they've been listening to the sermons of a small Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola who preaches from the pulpit in the Duomo, railing against corruption in both church and state. He advocates a return to a Florentine Republic
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and civic pride and values through piety. Savonarola warns that if Florence doesn't get its house in order, the winds of God's vengeance will blow through the city, and indeed an evil wind is ready to roll all the way through Italy in the form of Charles the VIII of France who wants to reclaim Naples in the name of his country and threatens to sack any Italian town who stands in his way. Savonarola begins to predict an invasion of some sort. And when it finally comes, he's able to say, you see,
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I predicted this. I foretold it. He's able to kind of pass himself off as a prophet almost in the Old Testament mode. NARRATOR: This crusading friar's vision of invasion would come true. In 1494, Charles VIII, King of France stood poised on the Tuscan border ready to march through Italy with his army. Still made up of smaller republics that were feuding among themselves, Italy was ripe for takeover.
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While Italy's builders had been creating monuments that exalted humanity, in this new age, they would dedicate their designs to war. There is no such thing as a trained military engineer. And so it is that your greatest architects of the Renaissance, although sometimes they probably started out doing nothing about it, were called upon to design the fortifications of major Italian city. NARRATOR: Innovations and new technologies would now serve the military.
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The weapon of choice for Charles VIII was a fearsome new cannon. Medieval walls would crumble under its awesome firepower. The cannon became much more reliable and also able to launch a projectile that was much larger, heavier, and to launch it a further distance.
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And so Charles VIII brings these cannons with him over the Alps, and it becomes immediately clear that he can knock down virtually any fortification that he chooses. And this is a terrible thing. I mean, this is a crisis, right? Because all of a sudden, you can't hold them off. NARRATOR: Tall, thin, medieval walls were easily penetrated and destroyed by the force of new cannons giving Italian cities little protection. The outdated walls couldn't even support the weight
35:18
of new weaponry to use against invaders. NICHOLAS ADAMS: The new cannon had strong percussive powers. You could not put a new cannon on the old medieval wall and fire it because it would shake its own wall down.
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NARRATOR: Italian engineers would turn their attention to designing a lower, thicker wall that would support the weaponry and resist the incoming cannonballs. This new wall will resist, in fact, these larger guns because it can absorb the impact of the larger projectile. NARRATOR: Engineers would also redesign the layout of these thicker walls that surrounded the city. Military engineers develop an angled wall. NARRATOR: The angled bastions or star-shaped forts
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kept attackers at a greater distance with angled sides easily scattering individual shots of artillery. The cities become star-shaped, then you have the development of these large star plans with angled bastions that project from the city walls with their flanking coverage on either side. The angles create a series of faces. The faces are very important because the different corners of the city can, as it were, protect one another. NARRATOR: The bastion fort became the new model
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for defensive fortifications, seizing the imagination of military commanders all across Europe.
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But soon, the attention would shift from Florence and the rest of Tuscany to an old powerhouse that would redeem itself through monuments of glory and amazing feats of architecture and engineering.
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Da Vinci and Michelangelo, while best known for their works of art, also worked as military engineers during the Renaissance.
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[music playing] NARRATOR: 15th century Italy. Florence has become the center for the Renaissance, bringing new ideas about architecture, art, and engineering to the region. But Florence would soon cede the limelight back to a former powerhouse now on the rise again.
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Italy's center of power and glory would now return to the city that conquered the world, Rome.
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In the early 1300s there was a big beef in Rome about who exactly is Pope. So the rightful Pope supposedly goes off to France. And for the next several decades, the papacy lives in France. Now, by the 1370s when the popes come back to Rome, Rome is a ghost town. And for the next 100 years or so, all the way through the Renaissance, each pope is successively trying to rebuild Rome. Now in the 1490s when the Medici are booted out of Florence, Florence becomes a Republic, yeah. But they're broke.
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and Michelangelo, they split Florence because Florence is no longer happening. If you're a player, the place you want to be is Rome.
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Rome had been nothing in the 14th century because the popes had moved out, but they come back in the early 15th century. And from that point on, they began gradually to reorganize the papal state. NARRATOR: One pope in particular would usher in an unprecedented wave of revitalization and engineering. His name was Sixtus V. Sixtus and the popes who come after him feel the need to turn Rome into an important and impressive capital city, the capital of Christendom.
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Sixtus V sort of took it upon himself to re-urbanize NARRATOR the city.
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Church again, the city needed an extreme makeover. But re-engineering Rome would be an epic task. First, Sixtus was determined to clean up its mean streets. The city was teeming with criminals. Sixtus simply had all the vandals rounded up and killed. The next step was restoring the aqueducts, one of the greatest symbols of Roman engineering. When the water returned, the population boomed and the city flourished. Roads were paved, streets widened, and the city exploded with new construction.
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But Sixtus wasn't done. He had a master plan for the city, a framework for organizing future development through the placement of monuments of glory. One of his particular practices was in fact to use the ancient Egyptian obelisks that had been brought to the city by the ancient Romans. These were military trophies that the Romans had brought back in ancient times and had erected throughout the city. We know today that there are more Egyptian obelisks in Rome than in Egypt itself.
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And how Sixtus used these obelisks was to, in fact, place them as urban exclamation points. NARRATOR: Sixtus wanted to move one of those obelisks to the front of a new cathedral named St. Peter's Basilica, but he had a problem. It weighed more than 300 tons.
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Moving the obelisk was no easy task. NARRATOR: Sixtus would award the challenge to architect and engineer Dominico Fontana. Fontana's plan seemed simple enough, but the execution proved nearly impossible. To protect the stone, he encased the 660,000 pound obelisk in a colossal wooden tower. Iron bars were attached along the edge. The wooden tower had columns extending nearly 100 feet in the air with ropes pulled through the eyes of the iron bars so the obelisk could be winched up by windlasses.
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The plan was to use a crew of more than 900 men to execute the move. Using 40 windlasses, the obelisk was raised off the ground and lowered onto a platform of log rollers for the relocation to its new site. On April 30th, 1986, under the watchful eye of Pope Sixtus, the crew began the incredible engineering feat of moving the obelisk. When the men were hoisting it up, they were under command to remain silent throughout the whole process under pain of death
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if one of them, in fact, broke the silence. NARRATOR: Finally, 17 days after they began moving, the obelisk reached its new location in front of St. Peter's Basilica where it stands today. Word of Rome's extraordinary revitalization spread throughout Europe. The capital of the ancient world had finally returned to center stage, and the age of architects that had begun in Florence had now transformed Rome and the rest of Europe.
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Artists of all sorts could create such beauty and such wondrous works of art on the scale of St. Peter's Basilica like the obelisks that were erected throughout the city of Rome, like the dome of the cathedral in the city of Florence. It gave the human significance again, and it gave us a bit of an attitude as well that we are again the center of all things. And many people think it is with the Renaissance that modern culture actually begins.
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Bella Firenze. Beautiful Florence. Well, it looks pretty bella today.
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in a freezing apartment down there on the Arno in the middle of the dead of winter pounding out papers until 4 o'clock in the morning on Botticelli, it didn't feel so bella. Matter of fact, I was just about an inch from getting the bella out of here, going back to my day gig in LA, but I stayed and I got my degree. And I keep coming back here to Florence and Siena, I don't know, to be of service, to teach a field trip or two, perhaps to sit in on a lecture by one
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of these brilliant professors who lives here and runs around Tuscany trying to explain how the miracles of the artists and architects of Italy in this period did so much to pull us out of that Dark Age and illuminate the daylight of a modern world. For the History Channel, I'm Peter Weller.
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