In this book Eugenio Battisti, one of the world's leading experts on the history of Italian architecture, presents the work of Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446). Brunelleschi, a Florentine architect and sculptor, played a major role in Renaissance culture, initiating an authentic artistic revolution that gradually reached all of Europe. He studied with passion the forms and technical processes of classical Roman architecture which, along with the invention of perspective, led him to found a rational method for measuring space and to seek an architecture in which each single part is harmoniously blended and in proportion with the whole. This rationalism is the foundation of his language, and marks the entire urban structure of Florence: the colonnade of the Ospedale degli Innocenti (Foundling Hospital), San Lorenzo and the Sacrestia Vecchia, the Chapel dei Pazzi, Santo Spirito, and above all, the revolutionary solution of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore.