Comacini, Masters

COMACINI, MAESTRI. – Builders originating from the ancient diocese of Como. The expression « Magister Comacinus cum colligantes[sic] suis » and « cum consortibus suis » appears for the first time in two articles of the Edict of Rotari (643); in 741 an appendix entitled « Memoratorio de mercede Comacinorum » was added to the Edict of Liutprand (713), consisting of seven articles containing rules and provisions concerning the activity of building workers. It is therefore reasonable to hold that the m. c., organized in corporations or associations such as those appearing in the aforementioned edicts, continued during the early Middle Ages the tradition of the craft « collegia » of classical antiquity: not « aldi » or « servi », but legally protected free citizens, both in their associations and in the practice of their art, no less than in their individual economic activities.

The Como or Comacino area was fertile in builders, architects, sculptors, and carpenters, whose names appear in Burgundy, Switzerland, the Rhine Valley, and almost all the regions of Italy; these migrations, which were collective in character and particularly intense during the Middle Ages up to the threshold of the fifteenth century, initially corresponded to the spread of certain building methods; it is nevertheless difficult to establish whether certain structural features and architectural elements should be regarded as genuine inventions of c. craftsmen or whether they were instead distant derivatives of Roman imperial buildings or Syrian monuments; hence it appears more prudent, rather than focusing on the analysis of individual elements, to recognize in the art of the c. a tendency in taste which, departing from the Byzantine manner and from the still-living

traditions with classicizing tendencies of the Roman basilicas, adopts and elaborates in a crude and embryonic form approaches and solutions that would later find their development in Lombard architecture. Indeed, when this, in the 11th century, will have fully matured its stylistic characteristics, one should speak of Comacino art only in relation to the provenance of the individual craftsmen or of the work crews employed in specific undertakings: for, once channelled into the broad course of Lombard architecture, the experiences of the Comacini would lose all autonomous value and would be limited to producing particular inflections within a substantially unified language, despite the variety of its components. Among the testimonies to Comacino art are several works that anticipate features 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 developing buildings with a centralized plan, vaults, and a dome concealed by the tiburium, as attested by the baptisteries of Agliate, Biella, and Galliano, and by the church of S. Benedetto al Monte at Civate, with three apses opening onto a rectangular space. - Vedi tav. III.