Dome or Brunelleschi’s Dome. In 1418 the worried Florentine fathers announced a contest for the ideal dome design, with a handsome prize of 200 gold florins.and a shot at eternal fame for the winner. Leading architects of the age flocked to Florence and presented their ideas. From start to finish, the project was so charged with doubts, fears, creative secrecy, and civic pride that a lush tapestry of legend was woven around it, turning the story of the cupola into a parable of Florentine ingenuity and a central creation myth of the Italian Renaissance. What we know for sure is that another candidate, a short, homely, and hot-tempered goldsmith named Filippo Brunelleschi, promised to build not one but two domes, one nested inside the other, without elaborate and expensive scaffolding. Yet he refused to explain how he’d achieve this, fearing that a competitor would steal his ideas. Brunelleschi’s stubbornness led to a shouting match with the overseers, who twice had him restrained and forcibly ejected from the assembly, denouncing him as “a buffoon and a babbler.”