Starred Review With a great deal of charm and buttressed by understated humor, Fern tells a fictionalized story of Renaissance architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi and his most magnificent work, the dome of the Cathedral of Florence. When word comes out of a contest to determine who will design the dome, Pippo, a goldsmith known for his beautiful but useless oddities, is determined to win and shed his unwanted nickname. The judges decide upon his visionary design but also decree that he must work in concert with his chief rival and primary heckler, Lorenzo. Pippo is dismayed at the prospect of doing all the work and only receiving half the glory, but his determination to see his plan through to fruition wins out. Throughout, Estrada's timeless art highlights Florence's orange-roofed architecture and colorfully attired citizens. Readers won't realize just how massive a project constructing the dome really was until they arrive at the scale-shifting detail of tiny workers, scaffolds, and cranes, a scene like something from David Macaulay's The Way Things Work (1988). Although the primary drama between Pippo and Lorenzo is played out with grade-school churlishness, it offers a handy morality lesson: take joy in one's accomplishments rather than the accolades to which they might lead. An afterword fleshes out some of the historical and engineering details of the dome for those inquisitive about the Renaissance.

Gr 2-4 A slice of history is served à la Florentine for the delectation of curious minds in this revealing portrait of genius Filippo Brunelleschi. Determined and stubborn, he vies with a more physically and cosmetically advantaged rival in a competition to select the designer and builder of a dome to grace Renaissance Florence's grand cathedral. Estrada's excellent watercolor and gouache illustrations detail 1400s Florence perfectly, from costumes to workshops to construction sites to the soaring towers projecting above the red rooftops crammed inside the city walls. Fern's humorous text brings Pippo's crabby persona to cranky life as he ponders, sketches, schemes, calculates, and competes his way to a glorious completed dome and lasting fame. Extended author's and illustrator's notes answer questions that may be raised by the simple text, and a short list of resources (adult materials) is appended. This neat blend of fact and fiction is as seamlessly constructed as the intricate brickwork of the dome on the Duomo. Patricia Manning, formerly at Eastchester Public Library, NY

When eccentric Florentine goldsmith Filippo "Pippo" Brunelleschi wins a contest to design a dome for the city's cathedral, he gets stuck working with the self-important sculptor Lorenzo. Based on a real fifteenth-century event, the story, played here as gentle farce, doesn't justify the lengthy text. The handsome art, like the writing, is unstinting with architectural details. Bib.

The tale of Filippo Brunelleschi's unlikely bid to win the right to construct the dome for Florence's cathedral. The slim story attempts to describe the challenge: to build a dome for the cathedral that would retain its beauty yet support its tremendous weight. Irreverently referred to as "Pippo the Fool" for his dabbling with "peculiar machines" and "outlandish structures," Brunelleschi nevertheless presents an ingenious plan to float the dome over the cathedral with two domes, one inside the other. Colorful tile, marble and painted walls of Renaissance buildings provide a credible 15th-century Florentine setting. Estrada's palette and form, although more angular, are reminiscent of de Paola. The language, however, is uneven, jumping from lyrical descriptions of the cathedral to an awkward description of Brunelleschi's mood as a "bubble" in his chest. Regrettably for a book about architecture, neither text nor illustrations effectively convey to readers just exactly how the dome works, leaving them with a story of artistic determination, not genius. The backmatter provides some bricks and mortar for the story but may well be missed by young readers. (bibliography) (Picture book. 5-8)