Mobilità di manufatti, mobilità di maestri: note per una storia degli itinerari del marmo in Sicilia fra XV e XVI secolo

Abstract

In late fifteenth-century Sicily, the production and dissemination of works in white Carrara marble played a central role within the broader framework of the island’s participation in the Mediterranean mobility of craftsmen and artefacts, a key driver in the circulation of ideas and models. The Sicilian routes of marble outline a network in which the cities of Palermo and Messina emerge as leading centres in the development of a classicising artistic language, conveyed through sculptural works produced in workshops associated largely with families of Tuscan or Lombard origin. Alongside the journeys undertaken by artists and intermediaries in the marble trade—figures whose roles sometimes overlapped—between Sicily and Tuscany for the procurement of marble blocks, there were also the travels of masters compelled to leave their workshops in order to embark on necessary, yet arduous and risky, journeys toward construction sites located in inland centres. The substantial circulation of marble works in early modern Sicily thus delineates an intrusive geography capable of stitching together the island’s rugged terrain through the development of practices and procedures designed to overcome the difficulties and dangers of transport to places that were difficult to access due to the hilly and mountainous nature of the landscape. Retracing this phenomenon, beginning with extensive documentary corpora such as those collected and published by Gioacchino Di Marzo, Filippo Meli, and Hanno-Walter Kruft, may help to identify several points of departure for a history of the practices and procedures governing the internal mobility of works and craftsmen, as well as the interactions among professionals with different specialisations, set against the background of the circulation of models, languages, and techniques in Sicily during a transitional period between the Late Gothic and the Renaissance.