Filippo set an egg rolling on the table of the Council Chamber. “Let’s have a little contest,” he told all the architects gathered there. “Whoever can make this egg stand upright on this table should be given the commission, since that will show that he is the most intelligent.”
What commission? Raising the dome of the Cathedral of Florence. No one could figure out how to do it without great wooden beams and earthworks and heavy stone ribs. Architects came to Florence from all over Europe to study the problem and give their solution.
At a first meeting they had each explained how they would proceed. Proud Filippo Brunelleschi listened and kept wagging his head to show that he disapproved. When it was his turn to speak he poked holes in the projects of all the others. He claimed he knew how to vault the dome easily and without much expense. But when he expounded his plan, it sounded so abstruse and complex that the others declared him a babbler and a fool. At that first meeting nothing was decided. The architects went home to construct wooden models of their plans.
The egg-test came at the second meeting. The other architects brought models to show how they would vault the cupola but Filippo came empty-handed. He refused to show them his model. He simply repeated that he knew how to do the trick and the rest didn’t, which exasperated everyone. That’s when he rolled his egg on the table—Brunelleschi’s Egg, as it was known ever after.
Of course none of those other architects could think of a way to make the egg stand. “OK, Brunelleschi,” they said finally, “it’s your turn. Show us how.”
Brunelleschi smashed down the egg on the tabletop and made it stand firmly upright.
“Oh, come on!” the architects cried. “It’s easy that way. We all would have known how to do THAT!”
“Exactly,” said Brunelleschi. “And you all would have known how to vault the dome once you’ve seen my model.”
I thought it was Columbus who did the egg trick!
So did I. I had always heard of Columbus’s Egg but was never told a story to go along with it. His crunching the egg down on the table was like Alexander’s splitting the Gordian Knot with his sword. The Alexander story is in Plutarch–and there IS a story at least. The Brunelleschi story comes from Vasari, who wrote in 1550 or so and it must have been handed down in Florence from the days of Brunelleschi himself, quite a bit before Columbus.