But it was not until the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore was built that Brunelleschi was able to show his true intelligence. In 1418, the dome of the cathedral had not yet been defined, as no one knew how to build a dome large enough to accommodate the cathedral. The reason it was so difficult to figure out how to build this dome was that buttresses were prohibited and it was not possible to get rafters for scaffolding long and strong enough to build the dome. That is why, to solve the problem, Arte della Lana organized a competition. Brunelleschi won the competition because he was the only one who could hold an egg upright on a piece of marble. How he said he did it was by "...bumping this flat piece of marble with one end, and making it stand upright...The architects protested that they could have done the same thing; but Filippo replied with a laugh that they could have made the dome if they had seen his project. (Martin 78). Brunelleschi then built the dome, inventing a lifting device to raise the