Comacine masters

The name comacini Romantic historians of the nineteenth century traced to the location where they supposedly had their headquarters, the minute Isola Comacina in Lake Como, alleged to have been a safe haven during the Lombard invasion; a more inventive etymology derives from a supposed Latin expression cum machinis, referring to their tools.

The survival of brotherhoods of the comacini are based on the hypothesis[3] that the Roman secrets of masonry construction were never utterly lost in Italy but were passed on by the mason brotherhoods, which were supposed to be among the numerous documented collegii in which workingmen joined together for mutual protection, fraternal banqueting and eventual support of their widows throughout the Roman Empire, sometimes associated together as masters of the arcana or "mysteries" of their craft.

If mason's marks were the sign of the comacini, then evidence of their work has been found in several parts of Europe, as far as the capitals of the crypt in the cathedral of Lund.

[8] The efflorescence of a "Como-Pavian" school of sculptural decoration on pulpits and portals that surfaced in the area of Como in the late eleventh century and developed luxuriously to enrich facades in Pavia in the 1130s, then were disseminated more widely in the twelfth and thirteenth century, doubtless by travelling groups of artisans, is traditionally ascribed to a surfacing of a long-buried tradition of comacini sculptors, who were influenced by the animal interlaces of Lombard metalwork.

[9] In this corrente comasca that spread on the periphery of Romanesque and Early Gothic art, geometric interlaces are peopled with sleek monsters and figures that seem to synthesize some very disparate and distant influences: barbaric Longobard metalwork, Ottonian illuminations, Byzantine silk patterns, Islamic patterning, Coptic reliefs, have all been compared to the "Como-Pavian" current of sculpture.