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Comacine masters

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The Comacine masters (magistri comacini) were early medieval


Lombard stonemasons working in a region of excellent building
stone who gave to Lombardy its preeminence in the stone
architecture that preceded Romanesque style.

Contents
1 Comacini
2 Notes

Lion portal at the monastery church


(Kaiserdom) in Knigslutter

3 References
4 External links

Comacini
Their masons' marks have suggested arcane meanings for some
enthusiasts. The name comacini Romantic historians of the
nineteenth century traced to the location where they supposedly had
their headquarters,the minute Isola Comacina in Lake Como, alleged
to have been a safe haven during the Lombard invasion; a more
inventive etymology derives from a supposed Latin expression cum

Portion of the carvings of the choir


apsis of the church at Knigslutter

machinis, referring to their tools.[1]


The first mention of Comacine masters was in an edict of 643 of the
Lombard king Rothari, which concerned itself in Lombard fashion
mainly with the indemnity that would be due should a house collapse
which had been built by a magister comacinus for a patron ad opera
dictandi ("commissioning the works").[2] The reference has been
interpreted as granting certain privileges to magistri comacini, but
the context shows that modern readers are correct in interpreting the
key word comacini simply as "masons". Comacini are also
mentioned in a passage in the Memoratorium of Liutprand the
Lombard.

Capital of a pillar in the transept of


the church of Knigslutter

The survival of brotherhoods of the comacini are based on the hypothesis[3] that the Roman secrets of
masonry construction were never utterly lost in Italy but were passed on by the mason brotherhoods, which
were supposed to be among the numerous documented collegii in which workingmen joined together for
mutual protection, fraternal banqueting and eventual support of their widows throughout the Roman Empire,
sometimes associated together as masters of the arcana or "mysteries" of their craft. Each such confraternity
was composed of men (never women) located in a single town, and was made up of men of a single craft or

those worshipping a single deity, free, freedmen and slaves together, forming a bond very like the image of a
city, always under the uneasy surveillance of officialdom.[4] Such, it supposed, were the comacini whose
geographical center in the Early Middle Ages originated in Lombardy, in Como and Pavia.
If mason's marks were the sign of the comacini, then evidence of their work has been found in several parts
of Europe, as far as the capitals of the crypt in the cathedral of Lund. The "Como-Pavian" architectural
sculpture is recognized in the cathedral of Modena and its Torre della
Ghirlandina,[5] in central[6] and southern Italy, west across
Languedoc to Iberian Peninsula, across southern Germany as far as
Hungary, and even in England.[7]
In the Middle Ages, artists did not customarily sign their work, so to
detect the work of this corporation, historians look to masons' marks
inscribed in the stonework; in this way historians have traced
comacine master's influence as far as Sweden and Syria. Freemasons
claimed descent from the guilds of comacini.[8]
The efflorescence of a "Como-Pavian" school of sculptural
decoration on pulpits and portals that surfaced in the area of Como in
the late eleventh century and developed luxuriously to enrich facades
in Pavia in the 1130s, then were disseminated more widely in the
twelfth and thirteenth century, doubtless by travelling groups of
artisans, is traditionally ascribed to a surfacing of a long-buried
tradition of comacini sculptors, who were influenced by the animal
interlaces of Lombard metalwork.[9] In this corrente comasca that
spread on the periphery of Romanesque and Early Gothic art,
geometric interlaces are peopled with sleek monsters and figures that
seem to synthesize some very disparate and distant influences:
barbaric Longobard metalwork, Ottonian illuminations, Byzantine
silk patterns, Islamic patterning, Coptic reliefs, have all been

Stone relief carving of the Italian


Master in Kaisersteinbruch. Scroll
with the names Maderno, Ferrethi,
Regondi, della Torre and Passerini,
while to the upper right is a quotation
from Neugebude Castle.

compared to the "Como-Pavian" current of sculpture.[10]


Another notable group of medieval stoneworkers were maestri Campionesi from Campione, not far from
Como.

Notes
1. Giuseppe Merzario's I Maestri Comacini: storia artistica di mille due cento anni 600-1800 (Milan 1893) was already
received with resistance in professional journals. A review in The American Journal of Archaeology and of the
History of the Fine Arts 9.4 (October 1894), pp. 564-566 complained of "the author's enthusiasm for his subject,
combined with his want of discrimination, and his fondness for strained and impossible deductions drawn to suit his
purpose." (p 564).
2. Nikolaus Pevsner, "Terms of Architectural Planning in the Middle Ages", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 5 (1942), pp. 232-237 (p 236f).
3. This hypothesis of the unbroken tradition from Late Roman times was set forth in Giovanni Teresio Rivoira's Origini
dell'architettura Lombarda, Rome, 1901, vol.1 and has been incorporated into the lore of Freemasonry.
4. Paul Veyne, "Confraternities" in A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge:Belknap
Press), 1987 pp 189-91.
5. William Montorsi, La torre della Ghirlandina: Comacini e Campionesi a Modena.
6. The Casa del Maestri Comacini is still shown to tourists in Assisi.
7. Serra 1969:353.

8. According to H.L. Haywood and James E. Craig, A History of Freemasonry, the "Comacine masters" were
reportedly the predecessors or "progenitors" of the Freemasons (Freemasonry: "Comacini" (http://www.freemasonsfreemasonry.com/comacine.html))
9. Francovich 1937:51
10. Joselita Raspi Serra, "English Decorative Sculpture of the Early Twelfth Century and the Como-Pavian Tradition",
The Art Bulletin 51.4 (December 1969), pp 352-362.

References
Geza de Francovich, "La corrente comasca nella scultura romanica I and II", Rivista dell'Istituto della
Storia d'Arte e Archeologia 8 (1936), pp 267305, 9 (1937) pp 46129.
Joselita Raspi Serra, "English Decorative Sculpture of the Early Twelfth Century and the ComoPavian Tradition", The Art Bulletin 51.4 (December 1969), pp 352362.

External links
http://www.comacina.it/isola/isle.htm
http://www.villadeste.it/t0_thelake_history.html
http://www.enec.it/Cripte/Bitonto/Maestri.htm
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comacine_masters&oldid=669663619"
Categories: Early Middle Ages Lombardy Romanesque architecture Stonemasons
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