CLEP Western Civ I

Answer: B - Brunelleschi was the one of the foremost architects of the Renaissance. Prior to the Renaissance, domes had not been built since classical Rome, and architects had limited understanding of how to construct the feature. When Florence built a new cathedral around the beginning of the 15th century the plans called for a very large dome, even larger than the dome on the Roman Pantheon. Brunelleschi figured out how to build the dome for the cathedral in a titanic accomplishment of the age that took most of his adult life to accomplish. He is also credited with discovering linear perspective, the quality of artwork that makes a scene realistic by making objects in the background smaller than objects in the foreground, as they naturally appear to the human eye. The concept literally added a new dimension to paintings, elevating the two-dimensional scenes characteristic of medieval art to three-dimensional scenes that were realistic in their setting.