BOTTEGA D'ARTE. — The generic term bottega (from the Greek ἀποθήκη, “storeroom, warehouse”) signifies a place in which objects of every kind are stored and sold, but it also serves to define the ensemble of rooms in which artists and artisans produce their works. It is this specific meaning of a workshop that is conveyed by the more particular expression b. d'a.
From the Middle Ages onward, around the figure of the master, pupils, followers, journeymen, and apprentices gave life to circles from which emerged the great artists who later perpetuated the tradition independently. Within the b. d'a., the activity of those artisans who assisted the master in executing the more routine work also acquired a distinct character in the Middle Ages. This intense collaboration made possible, for the well-established b. d'a., a large-scale production capable of satisfying the numerous demands of patrons. Even great artists such as Giotto, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, the Pollaiolo, il Ghirlandaio, Donatello, the Della Robbia, Raffaello, Tiziano, and il Tintoretto had highly active b. and were surrounded by a large retinue of collaborators.
Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the custom gradually disappeared, and only scant evidence of it remained; nevertheless, the highly active workshops of artists and artisans should be recalled, the latter becoming particularly prominent from the eighteenth century onward in the production of furnishings and decorations for churches and private interiors. Those of Venetian artisanship, devoted to the creation of furniture, carved crystal, worked bronze, lace, etc., were especially important, as were the Neapolitan workshops producing nativity figurines (v.) maiolica (v.) porcelain (v.) factories scattered throughout Italy, France, and Germany.
In recent times, the decline of the b. d'a. has become more pronounced for reasons of various kinds, all of them nevertheless to be sought in the transformation of social life following the rapid and complete ascendancy of industry and commerce. The preceding century saw notable examples of groups of artists gathered in “studios,” often places for literary disputes and polemics important to the history of the figurative arts, rather than collective workshops.
Nor were there circumstances favorable to the survival of the b. d'a.; it persisted only in certain centers where it still exists today, for example in Alto Adige, especially in Val Gardena, where the woodcarving industry has been the ancestral heritage of those populations since the sixteenth century. Confined more within the domestic circle than within the heterogeneous setting of the b. d'a. proper, it has specialized in statues and high reliefs with religious subjects, ecclesiastical furnishings, and small, finely crafted votive images, acquiring a notable artistic character in some “workshops.”
The modern concept of b. d'a. subsequently underwent a complete change, and today it has come to mean, more specifically, a place for the sale and exhibition of objects from the antiquarian market. Only in a few major European cities—Paris, Rome, Florence, and Venice—do some b. d'a. remain with purposes similar to those of earlier times.