Fonti e risorse per lo studio delle corporazioni "artistiche" a Genova dal medioevo all'età moderna

Abstract

This contribution offers a review of archival and bibliographical resources on the Genoese artistic guilds. These companies protected and organized the professional activity of the figurative, decorative, and sumptuary arts, providing them with statutory rules. The first subchapter of this essay offers a summary of the data obtained from the city center’s toponymy, which still today evokes, with its streets and squares’ names, the ancient presence of the workshops, normally concentrated around the church of reference of the art they belonged to. The authors then analyze the archival funds located in several archives in Genoa and whose consistency is jeopardized by dispersion and historic destruction of much material. The third subchapter introduces a full and critical review of the available bibliography: from the first essays appeared in the 19th century in the journal of the Società Ligure di Storia Patria, to the latest works of the 20th and 21st centuries. While the first studies focused on legal and statuary regulations of the arts, from the post-war period onwards, under the impetus of the socio-economic disciplines and the social history of art, several scholars have been focusing over the past years on the organization of art making and art labor and the specificities of each corporative organization.