COMACINI, MASTERS. - Builders, natives of the ancient diocese of Como. The expression "Magister Comacinus cum colligantes[sic] suis" and "cum consortibus suis" appears for the first time in 2 articles of the Edict of Rothari (643); in 741 an appendix entitled "Memoratorio de mercede Comacinorum" was added to the Edict of Liutprand (713), composed of seven articles in which are norms and provisions relating to the activity of building craftsmen. It is legitimate to hold therefore that the m. c., united in corporations or guilds as they appear from the cited edicts, continued in the early Middle Ages the tradition of the craft "collegia" of classical antiquity: not "alds" or "serfs," but free citizens legally protected in their associations and in the exercise of their art no less than in individual economic acts.
The territory of Como or Comacine was fertile in builders, architects, sculptors, carpenters, whose names appear in Burgundy, in Switzerland, in the Rhine valley, and in almost all Italian regions; to these migrations, of a collective character and particularly intense during the Middle Ages down to the threshold of the 15th century, there corresponded at first the spread of certain building methods; it is nevertheless difficult to establish whether certain structural characteristics and certain architectural elements should be considered true inventions of Comacine craftsmen or are instead distant derivatives from Roman imperial buildings or from Syrian monuments; whence it appears more prudent, rather than focusing on the analysis of individual elements, to recognize in the art of the Comacines a direction of taste which, detaching itself from the Byzantine one and from the still living classicizing traditions of the Roman basilicas, adopts and elaborates in a rough and embryonic form arrangements and solutions that would later find their development in Lombard architecture. In fact, when the latter, in the 11th century, had fully matured its stylistic characteristics, one should no longer speak of Comacine art, except in relation to the provenance of the individual craftsmen or of the work crews employed in particular undertakings: for, once channeled into the vast course of Lombard architecture, the experiences of the Comacini would lose all autonomous value and would be limited to determining particular inflections within the framework of a substantially unitary language, even amid the variety of its components. Among the testimonies of the art of the Comacini are certain works that prefigure aspects proper to Lombard Romanesque buildings, such as S. Ambrogio in Milan, S. Vincenzo in Prato in Milan, and S. Pietro in Agliate. The Comacini were also of great importance in elaborating centrally planned buildings with vaults and a dome hidden by the tiburium, as attested by the baptisteries of Agliate, Biella, and Galliano, and the church of S. Benedetto al Monte in Civate, with three apses opening onto a rectangular space. - See plate III.
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Enzo Carli