ART WORKSHOP. - The generic term workshop (from the Greek ἀποθήκη, "storeroom, warehouse") denotes a space in which objects of every kind are kept and sold, but it also serves to define the set of spaces in which artists and craftsmen produce their works. It is to this specific designation of a working atelier that the more particular phrase "art workshop" refers.
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 figures of artists who then perpetuated the tradition on their own account. Within the sphere of the art workshop, the activity of those craftsmen who assisted the master in executing the more ordinary work also took on a particular character in the Middle Ages. This intense collaboration made possible for the accredited art workshops a vast production capable of satisfying the numerous demands of patrons. Even supreme artists such as Giotto, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, the Pollaiolo, Ghirlandaio, Donatello, the Della Robbia, Raphael, Titian and Tintoretto had highly productive workshops and were surrounded by a large throng of collaborators.
Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the custom was gradually lost and few traces of it remain: yet one should remember the very active workshops of artists and of craftsmen, the latter particularly established from the 18th century onward for the production of objects for the furnishing and decoration of churches and private interiors. Those of Venetian craftsmanship were of notable importance for the creation of furniture, engraved glass, worked bronzes, lace, etc., as were the Neapolitan ones for crèche figurines (v.) and the various manufactories of majolica (v.) and porcelain (v.) scattered throughout Italy, France and Germany.
In recent times the decline of the art workshop has become more pronounced for reasons of various kinds, but all of them to be sought in the transformation of social life following the rapid and total affirmation of industry and commerce. The last century saw notable examples of groups of artists gathered in "studios," often the seat of literary disputes and of polemics important for the history of the figurative arts, rather than collective laboratories.
Nor were there reasons favorable to the survival of the art workshop; it persisted only in certain centers where it still lives today, as for example in the Alto Adige, especially in Val Gardena, where the wood-carving industry has been an ancestral heritage of those populations since the 16th century. Confined within the domestic circle rather than within the heterogeneous one of the true and proper art workshop, it has specialized in statues and high reliefs on religious subjects, in ecclesiastical furnishings, in small and fine votive images, assuming in certain "workshops" a notable artistic character.
The modern concept of the art workshop has then become entirely transformed, and today it has taken on more particularly the meaning of a place for the commerce and display of objects from the antiquarian market. Only in a few great European cities — Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice — do some art workshops remain with purposes identical to those of times past.
Bibliography5 works
Giovanni Carandente